
In-person services may never operate strictly in-person again - tzvsi
http://theglobeandmail.com/business/careers/article-industries-that-provided-primarily-in-person-services-may-never/
======
lykr0n
I can't see myself wanting do continue doing anything remote when it's safe to
stop.

A lot of these articles are "we wern't doing this before COVID-19, but now we
can't go out we're doing this remotely and therefor we're going to do this
after the threat of COVID-19 disappears."

I do like the increased options, but part of the reason I like to go visit my
Therapist's office is that it's an office. I'm going to a different location
at a set time to do something- doing it over Zoom is a good alternative to not
having it but I feel like I get less out of it. In part because I live in a
small apartment and there is a bunch of distraction, but also It feels
impersonal.

My guess is a lot of people will want the option to have virtual
session/whatever, but few will take it consistently. I love have the option to
work remotely when I want to, but I almost never do because I'm more
productive in the office. It's nice option to have if I don't wake up on time.

~~~
kortilla
Do you think that would be different if you lived in a place big enough for a
dedicated office?

~~~
rayiner
I have a dedicated office with a door that closes, fiber internet, giant
monitor, etc. I can’t wait for all of this Zoom stuff to be over and go back
to being in the office.

~~~
pw
Why?

~~~
rayiner
I don’t find Zoom to be an acceptable alternative to in-person meetings. I
don’t like the lack of separation between work space and home space
(especially since my spouse also works). I miss having support staff available
in person.

~~~
ghaff
In all fairness, you're making the assumption that the people you're meeting
with are normally in the same location. Very few people I meet with are in the
same office and/or they're often traveling or otherwise not physically
present. So even if I came into the office every day, I would have a few
serendipitous encounters but most meetings would still be over video link.

~~~
lykr0n
I have a good example of this.

Right before all of this I went to Austin to sit in a room with people from
that office for a day for us to figure out how we want to continue using a
service internally. We could have done it over zoom, but I'm 100% sure we
would have been a lot less effective.

Zoom looses the ability for people to just argue and hash stuff out. There is
less back and forth. IT's not the same

~~~
ghaff
Oh, I don't disagree at all that getting people together in a room can be very
useful. I'm just saying that, for me, those people are usually not all located
in a single office so we're going to have to travel to some common location to
get together in a room. A fairly small percentage of the people I work with
regularly are within a hundred miles of each other.

------
jeffrallen
Remote everything sucks and I will stop doing it all as soon as possible.
Humans need stories, and stories take place in sets. Seeing the entirety of
your life through a window on your computer is not a life.

~~~
indigochill
This description immediately called to mind Rear Window for me, which largely
takes place in a single apartment and is widely considered a classic film.

But ironic pedantry aside, I do agree people need to get out. Even as a
homebody I find myself getting grumpy if I don't get out for some sun and
fresh air once in a while.

~~~
lonelappde
Rear Window wasn't about how great it was to live in that apartment. It was
about someone stuck in an apartment escaping by watching other people's
apartments.

------
madengr
My kids have been having their music lessons (cello & viola) remotely since
the quarantine. For the advanced student, I can see 50% of lessons workable as
remote, but not more than that. My kid may switch to every other lesson remote
(two lessons per week at 45 minutes each).

For the beginner, it doesn’t work that well, but I suppose it’s better than
nothing.

~~~
sitkack
But we need to figure out why the initial lessons are better in person than
remote. It could be that small changes are needed in camera placement, or
screens or something we haven't thought of.

For many instruments you outline, it is how the bow or the instrument is held,
this might be _better_ online with the right tools, esp if you had multicamera
pose estimation, it might not even need a teacher the majority of the time.

Or, it might listen to the student and tell them they should rest or contact
the teacher for some realtime feedback.

Are instruction times the length they are because of other issues? Should they
be longer or shorter? Can a single teacher oversee multiple students at the
same time? Does it _need_ to be 1:1 for the whole session?

~~~
learnstats2
You're proposing essentially that the vast amount of skill that teachers have
(as educators) can now be replaced by robots.

That wasn't the case before coronavirus and won't be the case afterwards.

The best robot teacher that exists is Duolingo, and I don't know a single
person who has learned a language to a conversational level that way.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Language and music aren't the same; arguably, the part of the class that
involves learning how to hold an instrument correctly could be replaced by
technology.

As for why this wasn't the case before coronavirus: there was no reason to.
There wasn't good enough of a market. Now, there is, so perhaps some ideas
from this situation will stick around for longer.

(Then again, I've heard numerous reports that in general, remote school
classes are a huge dumpster fire. I don't expect any of that staying when the
schools are allowed to reopen. But maybe the postmortems will bring some
nuggets of insight about effective remote schooling.)

~~~
pcc
As the parent of a violinist and a violist, I find the role of the teacher for
aspects like holding the instrument, to be less like "teaching" and much more
like "debugging".

Kids grow, and every person's body is different: even when they've been
playing for 10+ years and have reached the most advanced levels, they're still
asking their teachers and fellow musicians to "debug" posture - because subtle
changes can have outsize impact. This is why master classes exist, for
instance.

There are all kinds of tools in this debugging toolkit. Some of them are
rather tactile, such as feeling how much force is being transferred from the
hand to the tip of the bow, feeling how "soft" the bow-hand is being held,
feeling how much the bow arm's elbow is being allowed to sink under its own
weight, or how much the shoulder is being tensed - because muscle tension can
be a huge issue for string players. Not to mention the huge number of minute
adjustments that can be made to various angles and might involve tweaks to
shoulder rests, chin rests and so on.

Right now teachers have to debug, without being able to use their hands. A
tall order for anyone. Just imagine being asked to debug software without
being able to use your hands, or to poke at the system: no attaching a
debugger, no inserting print statements - all you can do is give verbal inputs
and observe outputs. It's a huge responsibility, when failing to debug, or
getting it wrong, can have serious consequences (life-long problems with pain,
for example).

Some teachers are much better than others at such "debugging", so yes from
that perspective it sure would be nifty to invent some technology that
guarantees more consistent results. But is it realistic? Every body is
different physically, and the human touch and expertise plays a major role.

So, I can't help but think it would actually be a simpler problem to create an
AI that can reliably debug software, vs creating AI that can reliably debug a
musician's physical relationship to their instrument.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Fair enough. I should've thought about complexities of handling instruments
more. My mind just raced to the memories of my piano lessons and the time a
friend was teaching me guitar; the part about correct hold/finger placement
were essentially pattern-matching, the kind I could see software solving right
now (enough cameras + right software). But I understand now that what I've
been taught was just the beginning of the beginning.

As for debugging in general, I agree and offer an analogy that might be
intimately familiar to everyone here: debugging your
parent's/neighbour's/friend's computer over the phone. I can handle it for
about two minutes before my head hurts and I start boiling from anger. These
days, I flat out refuse helping this way; if it can't wait, I only explain
them how to install TeamViewer and what numbers to spell me over the phone.

------
jakozaur
In Poland tele consultation in healthcare were rare. Now it is the norm
including drug prescribtion and paid sick leave.

Some consultations will go back, but a lot of changes will become the new
norm.

~~~
jagger27
Telehealth is a great asset. Minor diagnostics can be done so much faster
without waiting rooms and checkins while freeing up more time and space for
more serious in-person care.

------
crazygringo
It's interesting, therapy has some pretty unique properties where in-person
vs. remote can be better depending on the person.

For some people, having a literal physical "safe space" and an understanding
human does wonders, and there's connection and understanding that seems like
it might be hard to replicate virtually.

But for other people, the distance that video or phone provides actually gives
them the ability to open up _more_ than in person -- precisely because it
seems _less_ personal and therefore less threatening or potentially judging.
After all, it's just a disembodied voice or a floating head on a screen.

So it's pretty good to have a mix of options.

~~~
type0
What are you basing this on, personal anecdotal evidence?

------
Florin_Andrei
Wherein "never [...] again" means "for as long as we remember current events".
Which may last a couple years, a couple decades, or anything in between.

------
kwhitefoot
So nail bars, hair dressers, physiotherapists, dog groomers, painters and
decorators, gardeners, and loads more are suddenly going to be equipped with,
or replaced by, remote controlled robots?

Never mind that quite a few people actually enjoy being physically close to
others.

The world is bigger than the Globe and Mail seems to think.

------
ars
This seems like the biggest social transition since the always-connected
cellphone/smartphone.

~~~
asveikau
I don't understand why people are assuming this instead of the easier
explanation of that (1) things will eventually bounce back and (2) somebody
born in 1-2 generations will have no idea what the pandemic was like.

As precedent, I cite the 1918 flu. In 1918 people were getting arrested for
not wearing masks. The following decade was called "The Roaring '20s," and I
don't presume it roared because of all the social distancing and masks. All of
us reading were born later, and if we heard about the 1918 flu, maybe in a
history class as I remember, most of us probably reacted with ... "what?
what's so bad about a flu?"

Society moved on pretty quickly.

Now, SARS-CoV-2 happened 17 years after SARS-CoV, so the counter-point to this
argument is maybe we get more of these things in the coming decades. But. I
still think it's pretty likely our grandkids forget about all this.

Edit: I guess another difference vs 100 years ago is we now have the
technology to do things at a distance. So yes, maybe some people will find
they prefer to do some things over video streaming and it sticks. I still
think in-person stuff will make a comeback.

~~~
makomk
From what I can tell the way society is reacting this particular respiratory
pandemic - and the way the media is portraying it - is completely without
precedent, so we can't point to history to guide us. Parts of the US might've
required mask wearing in 1918, but there wasn't the massive shutdowns of
everything or the full-press media coverage we have today. I've seen people
who lived through previous major pandemics say they barely noticed them at the
time and they weren't exactly front-page news; you certainly couldn't say that
about this one, especially after the New York Times dedicated its entire front
page to (questionably sourced) names and details of people who've died in
order to hammer home the point that this is a massive, vitally important
tragedy.

~~~
kennywinker
Why do you think this is NOT a massive, vitally important tragedy? ~2k
americans died in 9/11 and american life was never the same. ~100k americans
have died (so far) from this and you think it's not a big deal?

~~~
makomk
This is a terrible comparison. The raw death toll was not, in any way, shape
or form the thing about 9/11 that changed the planet - every flu season kills
far more Americans than that, and the big flu pandemics I'm comparing this one
to that are almost forgotten were firmly in the 100,000 American deaths
ballpark (not to mention the even worse global deaths).

~~~
kennywinker
Well we hit 100k and it seems to be wrapping up and we’re all immune now so i
can’t see anything to be worried about /s

------
jagged-chisel
Does anyone offer face-to-face service over video chat? That's what I'd like
to see.

------
mdoms
This is very strange to read from here in New Zealand, where life is fairly
close to getting back to normal. I don't see any reason why our basic
lifestyles should be permanently changed by this virus. As bad as things feel
now, we will eventually get on top of the epidemic and in a few short years
this period will be a distant memory.

I'm not saying there won't be permanent changes - I believe this is a catalyst
that will make remote working the norm for many industries, including my own.
But I have been hearing, for example, American podcast hosts saying they may
never step inside a restaurant again (this was on The Argument, and all three
hosts agreed) or people claiming that the tourism industry is permanently
neutered. I just don't see human behaviours changing so dramatically, and I
don't see any reason why we should be more afraid of Coronavirus in 10 years
than we are of Polio today.

~~~
baxtr
People tend to forget that we experience pandemics every now and then. In-
between life is “normal”. Just remember the famous picture of police men
having all a mask on from 1918 or so. I am sure they were gone by 1920 or so

~~~
glofish
exactly, as far as the previous pandemics go this one is fairly mild, have you
heard of the Hong Kong flu of 1968? Killed over a million people, we haven't
even heard of it.

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

we won't forget this virus for long time, but not because of the damage it
does, but because of the damage we did to ourselves

~~~
pbourke
They had a vaccine for that 4 months after the outbreak.

~~~
makomk
From the WSJ article that fact is sourced from: "A vaccine was developed
relatively quickly—researchers had learned from the other two 20th-century
influenza pandemics, the Spanish Flu of 1918 and the Asian flu of 1957—but
wasn’t widely available before the disease had reached its second peak in most
countries." So basically, there was a vaccine much faster than we could expect
one for this coronavirus, but it was still too late to help much. (See
[https://archive.is/5pYqk](https://archive.is/5pYqk) for the full text of the
article, which is quite interesting.)

------
SpicyLemonZest
May never operate _strictly_ in person again, was the original title. I guess
I'll give the benefit of the doubt that it was an honest mistake, but it's a
mistake that vastly changes the meaning of the headline.

~~~
dang
Agreed - I just posted about this before I saw your comment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23295148](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23295148)

------
dang
This submission provided a fun example of title editing. The article title
exceeds HN's 80 char limit, so had to be changed. The submitted title was
"Industries that provided in-person services may never operate in-person
again", which is not bad, but it's a bit misleading. The qualifier "strictly"
is important, because without it you get kind of the opposite of what the
article is actually saying, which is more along the lines of this quote: "
_You’re going to still see your doctor, but now you’ll be adjunctively cared
for virtually as well_ "

It's a subtle distinction, but it's consistently surprising how small nuances
in titles produce widely divergent discussions. A comment like
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23294773](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23294773),
to take an obvious example, is a reflexive objection to the submitted title
("may never operate in-person again") but the word "strictly" defangs that
objection in advance. There are other comments in this thread that you can
tell were mostly reacting to the submitted title, too, since they're arguing
with something it said, rather than what the article says.

Why this is fun: it turns out that you can take a strict substring of the
article title (in this case a tail) which solves the problem perfectly. That
is my favorite category of title-shortening. Often the substring isn't obvious
at first and you get a satisfying click when you realize it works.

------
ttul
Consider that there may never be an effective vaccine. It may take a decade
for enough people to obtain some level of immunity or for the virus to mutate
to a less dangerous form.

~~~
ghaff
People are going to go back to living some semblance of normally, vaccine or
not. They already are in many places.

------
booleandilemma
I know this isn't the popular opinion, but aren't we blowing the virus out of
proportion a bit?

Don't something like 20-25% of all New Yorkers already have antibodies?
Doesn't that show the virus isn't _that_ dangerous? The body count would be in
the millions by now.

~~~
jonahbenton
With all respect, I find this perspective incomprehensible, astonishing,
deeply depressing.

My take, as a NYer, as someone working on a COVID project, as someone who so
far has been lucky to only know of one serious hospitalization in my extended
circle- it is exceptionally dangerous. I use the phrase "Russian Roulette" and
I stand by that.

1% of likely-infected New Yorkers have died. Probably at least 80% of the NYC
population remains at risk.

It does not just target and kill the elderly and infirm. Of teens and pre-
teens, New York City has seen thousands of infections, hundreds of
hospitalizations, many dozens of deaths. Every age, every demographic
impacted.

There is so much we don't know about exposure to infection dynamics, about
symptomatic vs asymptomatic progression, about medium and long term impacts.

Yes, life presents all kinds of dangers, people have to work, all sorts of
essential jobs have to be staffed, the absolute failure of the Federal
government "leadership" to do even the minimum from a financial, logistic, or
medical perspective is unforgivably, sociopathically criminal and reduces the
practical options on the table-

ALL that aside this virus is no effing joke.

The only reason body counts US-wide are not in the millions is because of
shutdowns and various bits of behavioral and epidemiological good fortune the
details of which we will only figure out later.

It is almost certainly the case that 90% or more of the US population remain
vulnerable, and if people become careless, deaths will rise again.

One more point- I have been in many internet arguments about the various
statistical/aggregate measures, eg suggestions that only 30% antibody
prevalence may be enough for herd immunity, studies of superspreaders, etc-

Aggregate statistics are BS.

They tell you nothing about you or your family's individual risk in any
specific situation. The number of people "doing everything right" yet winding
up in the hospital is countless (as are the people doing everything wrong and
remaining well). We know a lot yet are still just looking for the keys under
the streetlamp.

We are not done with this. This may only be the end of the beginning.

Stay safe. Cheers.

~~~
theduder99
A++ post, almost got me!

------
narrator
So we're all going to learn to cut our own hair and pull our own teeth?

~~~
tzs
If you don't live alone, it's not actually all that hard to do home haircuts
if you just want a basic haircut.

The 1500 hours of training it takes to get a class A barber certificate in
Texas (the first state whose requirements I happened to find on the web),
which I presume is similar for barbers in other states, covers a whole lot
more than just a simple haircut.

A lot of things that can be done reasonably easily, at least in a basic way,
at home require a lot more training and preparation when offered as a service
to the public. When offering a service to the public you have to deal with a
much wider variety of situations, and you have a much higher volume making
things like sanitation a lot more important.

(For anyone curious, that 1500 hours is 180 hours of theory, and 1320 hours in
instruction and practical work. The theory is 50 hours of anatomy, physiology,
and histology of hair, skin, muscles, nerves, cells, circulatory system,
digestion, and bones; 35 hours of barber laws and rules; 30 hours of
bacteriology, sterilization, and sanitation; 10 hours on disorders of the
skin, scalp, and hair; 5 on each of salesmanship, barbershop management,
chemistry, shaving, (scalp, hair treatments, and skin); 4 each on sanitary
professional techniques, professional ethics, and the scientific fundamentals
of barbering; 3 on cosmetic preparations; 2 each on (shampooing and rinsing),
(cutting and processing curly and over-curly hair), (haircutting, male and
female), and (theory of massage of scalp, face, and neck). 1 hour each on
(hygiene and good grooming), barber implements, (honing and stropping),
(mustaches and beards), facial treatments, (electricity and light therapy),
and history of barbering.

The 1320 practical work is 800 hours of cutting (men's, women's, children's,
curly, and razor), 80 hours of shaving, 55 of styling, 40 of shampooing and
rinsing, 30 of bleaching and dyeing, 28 or waving, 25 of straightening, 25 of
cleansing, 22 of professional ethics (how does this differ from the 4 hours
covered in the theory part, I wonder?), 22 of barbershop management, and a
bunch more subjects requiring from 8 to 17 hours).

~~~
theriddlr
You'd think with all the training ladies' hairdressers would know how to deal
with different hair types. My hair isn't that much different from Caucasian
hair. Even some ladies' hairdressers in the UK don't know how to deal with my
Asian (Oriental) hair. The strands are thicker and I have more hair as well. I
either go to the Asian salons or go for the non-trainee hairdressers.

I have received highlights that aren't visible at all except under the sun,
hair that doesn't hang right as the weight of my hair holds it straighter when
it's long, left with too much hair as they don't understand what thinning hair
is, etc.

------
LockAndLol
> That being said, my whole team, myself included, are noticing that as we
> continue to provide Zoom sessions we’re getting better and better client
> sessions; we’re having breakthroughs all the time now.

Excuse me, but Zoom? How is that still allowed in healthcare? Are all privacy
issues resolved?

~~~
navbaker
Paid versions of Zoom implement stricter privacy measures and conform to
formal security audits. I work for a government contractor and the paid
version of Zoom we use is certified for official business according to some
arcane standard.

~~~
tialaramex
So you figure Zoom lied to ordinary users saving all the money and effort
needed to do it properly, but they made sure to also build a special secure
version for their "paid" users who have an official certification?

Let me suggest a question you'd be better off asking. Imagine that to your
astonishment they just pocketed the money and gave you the same crap as
everybody else, who do you think pays? Have you seen anywhere a pile of money
you get as a prize if they'd just lied? No? Because there isn't one.

~~~
navbaker
I’m just relaying the (presumably reliable) information given to us by our
fairly robust IT department. If you have credible evidence that Zoom is lying
to their corporate partners, I will absolutely pass it along!

