3 ms·
His decision was a false dichotomy. If the problem was people in the office space (fire marshal), then he could have started having employees work from home. I
by eutropia 7y ago
His decision was a false dichotomy. If the problem was people in the office space (fire marshal), then he could have started having employees work from home. I'm sure that even in the dot com era, telephone and IRC and email would have worked out just fine for coordinating business.
That's sort of the middle road, between buying office space and firing people, right?
- jasode 7y ago>he could have started having employees work from home. I'm sure that even in the dot com era, telephone and IRC and email would have worked out just fine for coordinating business. The 1999 to 2001 time period of home-internet was mostly slow dial-up modems instead of high-speed broadband. I'm unaware of any high-velocity SV company that had an army of remote workers collaborating and checking in code over dial-up. (Yes, Linus Torvalds Linux project was collaborating over email but that's a different cadence.) In the story, he says they lost half their customers in the dot-com crash. That magnitude of revenue loss is going to overwhelm the savings of having people work from home and layoffs will happen anyway.[0] The company still has to pay employees' expensive full-time salaries whether they're in the office or remote. [0] https://www.google.com/search?q=loudcloud+layoffs&oq=loudcloud+layoffs https://www.google.com/search?q=loudcloud+layoffs&oq=loudclo...
- icedchai 7y agoLarge parts of the east and west coast had broadband by that time ( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/@Home_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/@Home_Network for example.) I had a cable modem by 1998. Before that, since 1996, I was on ISDN.