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Covid-19 precautions for Stripe employees and customers
- devmunchies 7y agoI 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 7y agoI 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)
- awad 7y agoThanks for bringing this up. I always see only positives when discussing remote work but there’s never any consideration made for those who otherwise whose jobs rely on in-person interaction.
- prawn 7y agoI wonder how much business travel, in-person meetings, working in offices, etc won't rebound after this?
- dwd 7y agoHopefully quite a lot, assuming workplaces realise the benefits.
- devmunchies 7y agoI 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.
- prawn 7y agoOne reason I asked at least part of the question is that I co-own a co-working space (and work out of it) and we might eventually be impacted by this health issue. If you haven't, you should try a part-time desk if there are any spaces near you. We have a few part-timers and I always appreciate the social side of a shared space, including having a variety of people/jobs around me.
- ddavis 7y agoI agree with this. Perhaps I don't know what I'm talking about, but it feels like it would be difficult to execute. A smaller office space would be ideal, but what if half of those 80/20 folks come in on the same day? Would people have to be sent home?
- jeswin 7y ago> 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 7y agoI’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 7y agoYou must live in Europe. :-) 4 or 5 hubs would cover maybe half of California.
- jedberg 7y agoI 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.
- lettergram 7y agoPerhaps -- I have a feeling it'll go the other way (business will see how challenging remote workers are). Most businesses are not setup for "at home" work, the management style, communication requirements, etc. Further, and perhaps more importantly our infrastructure really isn't setup for that. Imagine, suddenly having many times the bandwidth usage from VPNs and video conferencing. I'm wondering if the whole U.S. does this, if our national ISP infrastructure can hold up.
- sjg007 7y agoOf course it can. The limitation would be vpn appliances but you can elastically create them in awe if u really need to.
- geerlingguy 7y agoSays someone who hasn't seen numerous small(ish) businesses still running their VPN as hardware devices hooked up to ISDN lines...
- sjg007 7y agoIf you are running vpn concentrates behind an ISDN line you are doing it wrong.
- geerlingguy 7y agoI didn’t say it’s right to do that... just that it is that way many places.
- chime 7y ago
- winrid 7y agoAs someone that's taking the train to work in the Bay area I so hope my employer does this soon...
- bvandewalle 7y agoAh, I'm in the same train as you.
- busterarm 7y agoWe 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.
- tlrobinson 7y agoHere’s Coinbase’s in-depth plan that this appears to be partially based on https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SRP4dnVCvKB7A5WXrESe-cL51i6_cg5nNGLNld6qch0/edit# https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SRP4dnVCvKB7A5WXrESe-cL5... Some of the phrasing is identical: > are likely to get sick more easily or for whom getting sick would be particularly problematic
- ewhauser421 7y agoIs Coinbase willing to make their guide on how to stay safe when working from home public? It’s a link in the doc.
- bobwaycott 7y agoThere a quite a few links in that doc that would be interesting (and helpful) to read, but are unavailable.
- craftyguy 7y agoFFS. Will "hacker" "news" not rest until every "tech" company employee reports in with their company's "just stay home" message?
- etxm 7y agoFlew to SF for CodeBeam, crossing my fingers I didn’t poke the pooch.
- moultano 7y agoReally 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 7y agoI 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.
- moultano 7y agoI would think the main trigger to stop would be once the uncertainty is resolved. If we know it's less deadly than feared, or if we know how big the outbreak is, or if we know how effectively we can control it. If we don't see exponentially rising hospitalizations and deaths in the next few weeks, then relaxing it should be fine.
- ISL 7y agoSounds 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 7y agoIf 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.
- zubspace 7y ago
- 99_00 7y agoA reminder: The risk of getting COVID-19 in the U.S. is currently low. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/about/share-facts.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/about/share-facts.... 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 7y agoI 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.
- Johnny555 7y agoI want to get it to get it over with I want to avoid it completely until a vaccine is ready. Just like I want to avoid the flu.
- themagician 7y agoIt might be ground zero. No one been testing for it, those under 50 seem to exhibit symptoms so mild they aren’t even worth going to the doctor for, most people go to the doctor only as a last resort because of deductibles, and healthcare professionals have likely passed it off as the flu. Hundreds to thousands die from the flu every week. They don’t test them all. If even 1% are misdiagnosed the infection could be far more widespread than realized. Even if the fatality rate is 2%, that means the estimated number of infections in Washington is 100+. For every person who dies you can figure 50-200 infections. With the flu, we model and estimate infections. With the coronavirus we seem to only be counting confirmed infections. This change in methodology will make the total infections look smaller and the fatality rate (possibly) arbitrarily higher as a result.
- 99_00 7y agoIf you're going to get it, it's defiantly better to get it now because you'll have the best Drs in your city looking after you before the flood of patients come in and they are overwhelmed.
- fossuser 7y agoA 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.
- aaron695 7y agoWhy 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?
- pengaru 7y agoSlowing down its spread matters. A company working remotely while its workers eventually contract the virus piecemeal on a presumably much slower and staggered schedule is far better than having your entire offices out sick wholesale for weeks. Not to mention it's better for society and our health system in general to slow the spread.
- jacquesm 7y agoStripe is being a good and responsible employer.
- jorisw 7y agoI'm sure of their good intentions, the question is how informed their choice of measures is.
- eric-hu 7y agoOn a societal level, you want to slow it down. A lot of deaths in Wuhan were caused by medical system overload. A small percentage of infected died even after getting invasive breathing assistance, etc. But many others didn't get a hospital bed at all and presumably died with milder conditions. There's a big difference in the fatality rate inside and outside Wuhan, and that difference is from an overloaded system. ~5% in Wuhan versus <1% in the rest of China.* * https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-rate/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-...
- xrd 7y agoIf this helps non remote employees (and managers) develop empathy for remote employees, well, that'll be amazing at pushing remote culture forward.
- awfycooper 7y agoWe'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.
- LatteLazy 7y agoI'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...
- blackrock 7y agoAt 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 7y agoSuburban 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!
- dustinmoris 7y agoWFH 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.
- jorisw 7y ago> 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 7y agoHigh 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.