
Our Self-Isolating Future: How working from home could reshape society - furtively
https://onezero.medium.com/coronavirus-is-a-preview-of-our-self-isolating-future-f5e73b046104
======
PragmaticPulp
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 for every job at the exact same time.

Even the remote teams I know are struggling to get work done in the middle of
this 24-hour news cycle of virus news and political battles about how to
address it.

I don’t think we’re going to look back on this experiment and conclude that it
was a net win for productivity or even for worker happiness.

~~~
api
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 no-
go.

Non-parents don't get it. It's impossible to get anything done with kids
around. The only way I can imagine it to be possible is if you were to abuse
and traumatize your kids so they'd leave you alone because they're afraid of
you. Maybe that's what some of our ancestors did.

~~~
projektfu
It sort of makes you wonder where we went wrong. Other social forms had
children integrated into the things adults do.

~~~
Kaiyou
The part where it was made illegal for children to work. Humans had children
integrated into the things adults do, too. I don't even get who pushed for
this. It just alienates young adults from life, opening paths for them to turn
to drugs and other destructive behaviors.

~~~
projektfu
The industrial revolution probably had something to do with it. No push for
kids to stay out of work before that.

------
bitwize
What self-isolating future? In the USA, as soon as coronavirus blows over the
boss will say: "Okay, back to work. I need you in the office during core
business hours." And hour+ long commutes will come back with a vengeance.

It's part of American work culture. It's a form of virtue signalling. By
showing up at the office every workday, early in the morning, you are
indicating your commitment to the company and to delivering value for their
investment in you. Executives and managers won't give that important signal
up.

~~~
joquarky
> By showing up at the office every workday, early in the morning, you are
> indicating your commitment to the company and to delivering value for their
> investment in you.

There's a term for that:

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

------
davidgh
I have been WFH for more than a decade. I love it. Being a planned transition,
I prepared for it, set things up properly, have appropriate separation, etc.
If someone didn’t know, they would have no idea that I wasn’t in some type of
office. No doorbells, kids screaming, dogs barking, _because of a proper
setup_.

In spite of this, I have been pretty worthless the last couple of weeks,
primarily due to all the distractions of what’s going on.

When you consider that for many people, WFH started immediately with little
time to prepare a proper setup, who are also trying to figure out how to be
part-time teachers, PLUS the distraction of the current state of events, I
suspect that most companies that didn’t do WFH before the crisis will
reconvene when this is all behind us and say “WFH was a disaster, productivity
was trash, and we’ll never do it again.”

If that happens, it would be a sad outcome, because under proper circumstances
WFH can be a great lifestyle benefit with equal or greater productivity than
an office environment.

------
Accacin
I'm lucky enough to be able to work from home, and I'm having mixed feelings
about it. As usual, there are pros and cons to everything.

Pros:

\- Able to be at home all day, feel I have more flexibility.

Cons:

\- I miss cycling to work.

\- I miss getting out the house

\- I miss chatting to colleagues

\- I miss lots of indirect help from other developers.

I might feel differently if I had to drive to work, as I hated that. Now
though, my commute is a 15 minute cycle down a clean, wide, and seperated
cycle path which I love (especially in the sun!).

~~~
overcast
What's stopping you from getting out of the house? Cycle before work, and
after work.

~~~
blaser-waffle
Right now? The government. Non-essential travel and outdoor activities are
banned.

If I lived in a rural area I'd probably be outside working on a new deck or
garden, but I live in a city and I'm stuck in an apartment.

------
nemo44x
Working from home isn’t about just moving people from an office to home. It’s
a culture the e tire company has to adopt for it to be effective. The way
people communicate, meet, schedule, etc. You need to prioritize asynchronous
communication, you need managers that don’t feel a need to babysit adults, you
need to record many things, you need software that makes for seamless
collaboration.

You need a company policy that gives at least a $1k budget for home office
supplies like chairs and desks.

And you do need some offices for people to congregate to and for field
operations if you have them. And you need policy to allow for personal office
rental for those that don’t live within a commute to an office and can’t work
at their home.

And employees need to get used to a more independent way of working. That they
can set their own hours, etc.

~~~
lnsru
I am not sure if company must give everything to remote workers. Remote worker
has immense gain of avoiding wasted commute time. I happily pay by myself for
an extra room and equipment just to avoid this wasted time.

I am working for a company where all decisions are made and communicated
during lunch break in the canteen or near water cooler. At the moment the
managers look pretty clueless, they have no idea how to start written
communication.

~~~
nemo44x
You do it because it's worth it. The fully loaded cost of an employee that
doesn't need an office space is more than made up for with a $1k or so budget.
Getting someone out of a physical office saves the company thousands a year in
many places.

Additionally, you want your employees to have a comfortable environment as it
makes them more productive. If you're going to make your company a distributed
company than you need to take some of the savings from not operating large
offices and invest it in the remote experience.

------
2T1Qka0rEiPr
I'm not sure that viewing this as some kind of _dry run for a future in which
we all work from home_ is particularly fair, on multiple fronts. Firstly, this
isn't a _choice_ anyone has made, it's something which has been forced upon
them. Working from home is (for some) great, but in its present state, many
are restricted from leaving the house unless absolutely necessary, and so
we're not so much "working from home" as "living from home". I think is a
crucial difference, because people are currently denied any physical form of
socializing, not merely during working hours. The speed at which this
situation was forced upon us, also means that few of us have the separate room
with perfect working conditions which a typical full-remote worker might.

From the perspectives of the companies it's _also_ unfair to look at their
hiring habits and speculate on their attitudes to working from home. Many
companies are struggling to meet payroll, fighting with uncertainty, and
desperately trying to form new communication structures in order to support
the business. During such time, _of course_ hiring is not going to be a
priority.

Speculating on the outcome of this nightmare seems somewhat foolhardy, and
extolling the virtues of working from home myopic given the many people who
now find themselves struggling or out of work, ill, or forced to work in what
are increasingly dangerous environments.

------
mrfusion
The HN who’s hiring post yesterday convinced me absolutely no one new is going
to consider work from home when this is over.

These are the companies on the forefront of technology and zero opinions have
changed.

~~~
detaro
Rethinking and rewriting job openings probably wasn't the highest priority
now, so not sure it's a good indicator yet.

~~~
mrfusion
Very true. I saw some people asking for clarification and the answers were
pretty anti wfh.

------
Mikeb85
This absolutely will be the future of society. It was already happening and
this will just accelerate it. Between streaming, gaming, video calling, food
delivery, online dating, etc..., we're already most of the way there. Social
spaces are shut down for the foreseeable future and might never recover.

As someone who's made a living in the restaurant sector most of their career,
this is both terrifying but also exciting. Delivery was never the most
exciting prospect because the economics were, for the most part, worse than
dine-in, but in the absence of dine in maybe people will want expanded
offerings? Lots of things to think about.

~~~
frankish
I, too, am strongly hoping this will radically evolve our society to leverage
more technology. I really wish the US stimulus package would instead focus on
investing in re-educating the population online for those that made their
living in the service industry and the like. Furthermore, automating that work
and doubling down on promoting a work from home culture. This is how we
prepare for the next epidemic.

In my opinion, a bad economy is the best time to get an education. My extreme
hope is getting closer to our cyborg future by furthering advancements in
digital communication and human-computer interfacing.

------
rad_gruchalski
It’s not going to stay like this. Everybody who is hiring today, unless they
were already remote friendly, are already openly saying “we do remote for 3 to
4 months and then bring everybody on site”.

------
treyfitty
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 logical step is to double down on platforms facilitating
a WFH culture during the inevitable recession? The last recession in 2007 saw
very slow job growth (compared to other recessions) simply because companies
opted to adopt technology rather than train+hire expensive labor. I fear that
the next leap will be widespread prioritization to set up satellite offices in
India and other countries where labor is cheap. If I were a Fortune 500 CEO,
my top priority during the coming recession would be to offset the lack of
H1Bs in the US and just go straight to the source- because I know every other
CEO would be doing the same. I fear for my future prospects a year from now.

~~~
sciencewolf
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.

------
Bubbadoo
Working from home is a godsend! Yes, now's not the time for the litmus test
but for most people, their commute is the most stressful time of the day, at
least under normal circumstances. We are not working under normal
circumstances at this time but as a net result, the Earth's air is becoming
cleaner, we're burning tons less fossil fuel and although I understand the
demands of child-rearing while trying to be productive, we are getting to
spend more time with our families.

Don't allow the stress of the situation to color your judgement of work from
home. It is a good thing in our modern time.

------
whateveracct
If you don't derive satisfaction from your productivity and instead are
optimizing you're output:effort ratio, remote really pays off. On-site only is
skewed towards increasing output since effort is largely fixed, but remote
allows you to begin trimming effort quite a bit.

But a lot of people treat work as more than a transaction. That's fair but not
for everyone.

------
unixhero
This is so behind the curve. We've been self isolating for weeks already.

------
DoreenMichele
So far for me and my family, Coronavirus has been a relatively minor
inconvenience compared to what others are apparently going through. I already
do remote work from home and hardly go anywhere other than to get groceries or
takeout.

I began doing remote work about 8 years ago while homeless. It was a good
solution for my circumstances and it was a good solution for my health issues
that were the actual root cause of my financial problems and homelessness.

Doing remote work has helped me protect my health and grow gradually healthier
when that's not supposed to be possible. So I can't help but wonder how many
people with serious health issues could be healthier if they lived more or
less under quarantine.

I also homeschooled my special-needs sons for years. One if them has the same
medical condition I have. They also have other issues.

As a homeschooling mom, I was a remote volunteer worker for an education
related organization. They helped me get to a related conference on the other
side of the continent where I was a very low level presenter.

I feel strongly that people with "quirks" \-- health issues, ADHD, etc -- are
the ones at the most risk of homelessness because they just can't make a
"normal" life work and we do a generally poor job of telling people that there
are lots of other ways to live and work, you just have to find the ones that
work for you.

I've spent some years trying to develop websites and the like to help homeless
people and people at risk of homelessness to find ways to make their lives
work. I think remote work and other "irregular" work options are key to that.

I've never gotten much traction and the past decade has cured me of childhood
brainwashing where I was always at the top of my class and the world around me
kept saying I mattered and all. At this point, I'm quite convinced that I
shall always be perpetually ignored.

I think I can make my own life work, so I sort of don't care anymore. But it
seems like a missed opportunity because I already know so very much about germ
control, working remotely, etc.

I'm not sure what my point is. I'm not sure I have a point or that there is
any point to trying to talk to with people about this. Recent years have
painted me as some kind of clown that no one should take seriously.

I think a lot of these decisions are going to de facto be made by the usual
suspects for whom "normal" life works well, which is how and why they got into
power. And I think that fact will help insure that people conclude that this
doesn't really work and it needs to be temporary and it's imperative we return
to "normal" as soon as possible.

But working from home was the historic norm. Family farms and craftspeople
with a shop in one part of the building and their home in the same building
and even retail establishments with the owners living upstairs was the norm
for much of human history. Separating our living and working spaces is
relatively recent. It's the weird and new thing.

My father was old enough to be my grandfather and I grew up with a garden in
the backyard and a father who hunted and am mother who sewed a lot of my
clothes. It was, in some ways, like a throwback to a prior century.

So those "old ways" are kind of living memory for me. And I never know how to
effectively talk to people and say "No, seriously, it doesn't have to be this
way. We don't have to accept these kinds of problems as the price for having a
paycheck or something."

I hope we embrace a philosophy that gives people more options, not fewer. I
hope we can find the opportunities and the upside in this situation.

But most people don't really want that. People don't like change. They hate
hearing that something like this has a silver lining. So I'm not very
optimistic that we will.

------
bamboozled
The minute I can leave my house and do some work in an office or cafe I'm
there.

WFH everyday is a joke.

Disclaimer, I have done a lot of remote work.

~~~
jtms
Just because you and your specific likes and dislikes don’t agree with WFH
everyday as a viable approach doesn’t make it “a joke”. I’m perfectly fine and
productive with it.

~~~
bamboozled
It goes both ways, you don’t have to be told to like work from home and be
downvoted over it.

