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Quarantine will normalize WFH and recession will denormalize full-time jobs

• manigandham 7y ago
  Only a small percentage of jobs are actually remote-capable, but most people would be just fine with 1099 work. Most benefits are unused and people prefer cash that they can spend on their own needs instead. Taxes might be harder to save for upfront but not a big deal. The biggest challenge is how healthcare benefits are tied to employment. It's something that made sense when it started but is now obsolete and seriously detrimental to the modern workforce. Many people either suffer from lack of insurance or are held captive in a job from fear of losing necessary coverage. Fix that and we would see a lot more positive developments for workers.
  • e40 7y ago
    Only a small percentage of jobs are actually remote-capable, but most people would be just fine with 1099 work. Most benefits are unused and people prefer cash that they can spend on their own needs instead. As a COO, I disagree with every one of those statements. EDIT: All programming jobs (in my company) are remote capable, and most already are. 95% of my employees use their health benefits.
    • Swizec 7y ago
      Not all jobs are programming. How’s a starbucks barista gonna work from home? Or a hairdresser? Or literally anyone that isn’t a knowledge worker? We’re still primarily a service and manufacture economy aren’t we? Hell even a lot of knowledge work can’t happen from home. I doubt microbiology research can be done from home. At some point you’re gonna need new data and experiments to analyze
      • UncleOxidant 7y ago
        Hairdresser is going to be a tough one, but I suspect the barista jobs are easily automated.
        • VectorLock 7y ago
          >I suspect the barista jobs are easily automated. Its called a coffee maker. And yet, Starbucks persists.
          • sjg007 7y ago
            Because everyone who is working from home goes to Starbucks to get stuff done.
            • VectorLock 7y ago
              Let me tell you about this amazing institution called Dunkin Donuts.
        • wyre 7y ago
          Coffee vending machines already exist but aren't able to handle the volume of a busy coffee shop. Also a good barista is able to control quality much more than any super-automatic machine even if it could keep up with production.
      • thaumasiotes 7y ago
        Hairdressers can easily work from home. You visit the hairdresser at home and you get your hair done. It's a pretty standard way to operate. The biggest obstacle to this is regulation making it illegal for hairdressers to work out of their home, not the logistics of hairdressing.
    • kingbirdy 7y ago
      Most jobs aren't programming jobs
    • manigandham 7y ago
      Being a COO is irrelevant. The vast majority of jobs are not programming related and require physical presence. Even if healthcare is used (again limited by options and employment), most other benefits are not, especially if you don't even come into the office.
  • marcinzm 7y ago
    >Fix that and we would see a lot more positive developments for workers. That basically requires getting rid of private health insurance (except as supplemental insurance) which is going to be a difficult battle.
    • kasey_junk 7y ago
      I’m fairly ok with arguments for public only health care but that said, why would detaching health insurance from employment require the end of private health insurance completely? Thats not true for any other of the insurances I have. My car, home, flood, and life insurance all aren’t related to my employer yet still exist.
      • marcinzm 7y ago
        Essentially pre-existing conditions (including ones the patient knows about but are not on their medical file) are a mess to deal with as they significantly spike expected costs. Healthy people have little reason for good insurance and unhealthy people are desperate for it. Car insurance is similar but that's mitigate by it being mandatory and even then pre-existing conditions (ie: accident rates) can spike insurance a lot. You can deal with it I believe by making insurance mandatory for everyone, banning all groups plans and preventing pre-existing conditions from being taken into account. Probably need some more restrictions on the fifty other ways of gouging expensive patients by insurance companies. But then you basically have government run health insurance in everything but name.
        • kasey_junk 7y ago
          All of the forms of insurance I mentioned are extremely regulated. All of them have adverse selection effects. All of them have good populations and bad. None of them are associated with employment and you’d think someone was crazy for suggesting they should be.
    • virmundi 7y ago
      Why? Private health insurance in the US is largely unaffordable due to regulations. Small businesses, ie consultancies with one practitioner, are prevented from joining together to negotiate health fees. Similar obstacles occur for individuals working 1099. How about removing those regulations first before going with a public option?
  • empath75 7y ago
    > Most benefits are unused and people prefer cash that they can spend on their own needs instead. I don’t think most people prefer to buy health insurance on the individual market.
    • manigandham 7y ago
      Why not? Isn't lack of healthcare or limited options one of the top political issues?
      • empath75 7y ago
        Because it’s more expensive and the plans don’t cover enough.
  • melq 7y ago
    > Most benefits are unused and people prefer cash that they can spend on their own needs instead How did you come to this conclusion, and what do you mean by ‘unused’? I‘m guessing you mean that a majority of people receiving health care benefits are healthy and thus don’t ‘use’ them enough that the amount of money spent on their health plans is larger than the amount they would spend out of pocket? Even if that is true, that’s not really the point of insurance. Insurance exists to protect you against an eventuality that you don’t necessarily expect to occur, but would be catastrophic if it did. People don’t buy liability car insurance because they expect to cause a terrible accident and want to come out ahead financially. There is a value to being insured whether or not you have to actively take advantage of the plan.
    • manigandham 7y ago
      Jobs offer many benefits, of which healthcare is only one. Healthcare being used doesn't mean everything else is. Things like food, equipment, travel perks, gym memberships, etc. could instead be spent on bigger paychecks, especially if you're already moving towards remote work.
      • melq 7y ago
        What food or equipment benefits exist for the average american remote worker? How much do you think is spent on the average worker’s ‘travel perks’ and gym memberships? The sum of the money spent on all non-healthcare benefits (aside from maybe 401k matching) is a drop in the bucket compared to healthcare premiums. I don’t think its unfair to assume that the only real benefit the average full time worker receives is their employers contribution to their health coverage. I don’t have any data to back this up, but I’m guessing the amount of people who even receive these extra benefits in the first place are a tiny minority of relatively highly paid workers.
      • brewdad 7y ago
        Outside of the SV bubble or Fortune 500 HQ offices, these perks are basically non-existent. I don't know anyone who's employer pays for food beyond a pot of cheap coffee. We have a couple of local gyms that offer discounts to employees of certain companies but that's like $10/mo on an already overpriced gym.
  • logicchains 7y ago
    >It's something that made sense when it started but is now obsolete and seriously detrimental to the modern workforce. It didn't even make sense when it started. In the 30s the US government instituted wage controls in a misguided attempt to fight the depression, so because businesses weren't allowed to pay workers more (there was a government-mandated wage ceiling), they started offering health insurance to attract them instead. It's a classic example of the negative second-order effects of economically unsound policy.
• awb 7y ago
  > As someone who’s been 1099 as often as not for the last few years, I don’t like the idea that these things are only available to employees, and would prefer a system that priced stuff equally for temps as for the elect. I never understood why healthcare was tied to employment. Yes, it's a nice benefit, but it's not like your health needs change significantly if your job changes. Maybe employers for dangerous jobs could offer supplementary insurance in effect at the workplace or job site. But access to affordable day to day healthcare is something we all need from birth to death without interruption. Especially when you consider infectious disease, the health of the community impacts all of us.
  • maerF0x0 7y ago
    > I never understood why healthcare was tied to employment. +1 its unclear to me why the pricing would go down for higher number of employees? The risk profile is still spread across many people in the case of contractors.
    • toast0 7y ago
      A small employer (or individual payer) is buying insurance, and the insurance company is going to need a good reserve because the maximum benefit is large relative to premiums. A large company often self-insures the healthcare cost, and is buying health plan administration. If high costs are not observed, the reserves can roll over to future years. Even if they don't self-insure, the possibility can be used to negotiate lower prices, and having data on past claims can show a less risky pool, etc.
    • kgwgk 7y ago
      Self-selection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection
  • dboreham 7y ago
    This is due to tax policy dating back long time.
    • 7y ago
• AdrianB1 7y ago
  "Our current run of low unemployment is economically weird in that salaries haven’t gone up that much." There is nothing weird, many companies took measure to not be impacted by hiring the cheapest people that can try to do the job, not caring too much about skills. My employer (big US-based non-IT company) is now hiring in IT without any IT skills interview or even a CV/credential check with the mindset that if they can keep the lights on for a few years, the next recession we can hire experienced people for cheap to fix the things that are currently neglected. I see this in every company I work with, big and famous IT software or services suppliers that are scrapping the bottom of the barrel and gives us unqualified people play-pretending to be developers, DBA's, architects etc. Everybody is cutting corners, in some cases very visible (Boeing), in others subtle (Intel and the 10 nm saga) and everyone else in between.
• zhdc1 7y ago
  No and no. Remote work irt Covid-19 was absolutely hated by most people in China once it lasted for more than a couple of days. Surprisingly enough, a lot of people actually like going to an office, where they can get away from their family and socialize. On the second point, the economic damage from natural disasters is usually short and severe, with a quick recovery. Barring Covid-19 turning out to be a lot worse than the Spanish flu, most impacted regions will return to business as usual sooner (as in a couple of months) rather than later.
  • ausbah 7y ago
    Pandemics aren't really natural disasters are they? A natural disaster is physical phenomena, usually geologically or weather based, like hurricanes, earthquakes, tornados, etc. Recovery time from those types of events isn't very quick, espeically if the country is underdeveloped - look at how long it took Puerto Rico from Hurrican Harvey, Joplin from the 2011 tornado, Haiti's 2010 earthquake, etc.
    • zhdc1 7y ago
      The textbook case is the 2004 tsunami and tourism in Thailand. Most of the destroyed infrastructure was replaced in about a year and tourist numbers (measured by number of passengers to Phuket Airport) recovered shortly thereafter. The short-term effect of Covid-19 on Chinese manufacturing have been absolutely devistating - I honestly can't think of another feasible event that would cause the same level of slowdown that you saw last month. However the recover is in progress, and while it's going to take some time, odds are that everything will more or less return to normal in another couple of months.
      • jdminhbg 7y ago
        > I honestly can't think of another feasible event that would cause the same level of slowdown that you saw last month. A war where shipping was disrupted would be much, much worse.
        • 7y ago
• PragmaticPulp 7y ago
  I can see normalizing WFH, but we need to get over this idea that WFH is the best option for everyone. That’s a very tech-centric view that ignores the fact that many people’s jobs really do benefit from, or even require, face to face interaction. It’s also ignores the realities that many people don’t want to WFH. Many of the parents with young children at home are dreading the loss of their office space right now. I also expect that the shift toward WFH will not be a positive thing for highly paid Silicon Valley engineers. Once people are working from home most of the time, it’s not much of a stretch to hire cheaper engineers from a few states over at literally half the cost of a SV engineer. From there, it’s only a few more levels of difficulty to unlock international talent at 1/4 of the price.
  • nkozyra 7y ago
    I've worked from home 9 of the last 10 years and much, much preferred the year of going into an office, being better at separating work/leisure, etc. I don't understand the appeal of doing either full-time. I can see myself being comfortable with a mix of home and office, there are advantages to each in different scenarios. It's not just tech, lots of jobs are tech adjacent or tech-augmented and can do this. More so than we thought ten years ago. But in short, it's not for everyone. I'm bored of it. It makes work part of my life one way or another. I like directly interacting other humans sometimes. There's gotta be a balance, as with most things in life.
    • ntsplnkv2 7y ago
      Think about this: The office is 5-20 minutes away. There is a good work culture. You have friends at the office. You can easily go home for a quick errand at lunch. WFH wouldn't be as appealing. Now consider: The office is 1 hour away on a good day. Traffic is very frustrating. Parking is expensive, same with transit which is hard to get an hour away. You get home at 6 if you're lucky. After 2 frustrating commutes and a rough day at work, and having to wake up very early to make the commute, you don't feel like working out. You get the point.
      • toomuchtodo 7y ago
• simonw 7y ago
  I'm wondering if this will have an impact on the San Francisco housing crisis. If it turns out WFH works out really well for tech companies, could we see a reduction in demand for housing in SF? I could certainly see tech employees deciding to move to a cheaper city where they can WFH and spend less of their income on rent.
  • dboreham 7y ago
    Hasn't this been a thing for 20 years? (Source: moved from the valley to Montata 20 years ago).
• TrumpMyGuns 7y ago
  Lol, this site is such a bubble.
• bsder 7y ago
  Sorry, but what a load of garbage. 1) The vast majority of work is NOT "knowledge work"--it is schlepping things around. Who are the biggest employers and what do they do? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers_in_t... Take a good look at that list. It's almost ALL about schlepping things around. That's takes people--in person. 2) Short term is incompatible with real social existence. You have bills every month. Your child is stuck in a specific school for 3/4 of a year or more. You're going to your sister's wedding next year. Sure, maybe if I'm a brogrammer in the Bay Area with no life, I don't care about getting upended continually. The rest of us with lives need money and need it on a schedule. 3) Most people aren't productive remotely because they are barely productive in person. The vast majority of people are simply not productive without some level of oversight. Most companies don't need unicorn productivity, they simply need people to produce a little something every day. Most people working most jobs don't want to think or work too hard, do want to do a little something and then simply go home to their real lives.
  • chapium 7y ago
    WFH causes a huge disruption in communications with mixed remote teams. Productivity loss comes from the communication friction that makes every interaction more difficult.
  • geggam 7y ago
    My problem when I WFH is I work too much. You need an office to go to so work is isolated from home
  • wott 7y ago
    > The vast majority of work is NOT "knowledge work"--it is schlepping things around. Who are the biggest employers and what do they do? It doesn't mean that those employers do not have hordes of office employees. As a manifestation of the local bubble, all comments I read so far seem to believe that only programmers already spend their day in an office in front of a computer, whereas they are only a very small part of the office workers who could more or less easily switch to Work From Home (and who sometimes already do it).
• droithomme 7y ago
  > WFH What the heck is WFH? He uses this weird acronym and doesn't define it. Oh, wait, Work From Home. OK. Some people might not be able to guess this without a lot of thought, like me. > CBD Sheesh, more of this crap. People, define the damn acronym first time you use it ok. Not everyone is a Mason with a secret code book. Usability 101. > LNKD > USV post I see. Author is pretentious nit. FTNAAs. TAPAOSHIR. Please don't post this wanky stuff any more, OP. Edit: OP Abe Winter flagging this confirms he is absolutely a grade A category 1 pretentious nit. Learn to write. What a maroon. Would. Not. Hire. Define your narcissistic personal acronyms Abe, you pretentious fatuous incompetent. PS only doing namecalling because of absurdly flagged my legitimate commentary, which is an act of extreme violence and censorship, making one an enemy of reasonable discourse. No wonder this, the precious snowflakes who "cancel" anyone with legitimate valid criticism. Complete losers.
• lopmotr 7y ago
  Since the problem with WFH seems to be lack of casual interactions, I wonder if it could be solved with very imposing video calling. Something like an always-on whole wall display showing another office, so you can see people from a distance, approach them at the wall, wave them over, hear background sounds, etc? Perhaps displays and internet bandwidth are only now (or not yet?) cheap enough to do this in your house.
  • cheerlessbog 7y ago
    I've done this in a team where we were spread across two offices. A TV on the wall showed the other office (on the other coast). We called it the wormhole. I can't remember it being useful in any way
  • lapnitnelav 7y ago
    I'd argue a voice chat solution might be a bit less intrusive while keeping the warmth of human interactions. Mumble, for example, is both excellent in sound quality and FOSS.
  • geomark 7y ago
    Farenheit 451
• KaoruAoiShiho 7y ago
  All the WFH companies must be salivating at this situation. Are there any public investment opportunities (other than Zoom)?
  • empath75 7y ago
    Slack.
  • nradov 7y ago
    Cisco. They have networking infrastructure, VoIP, VPNs, and Webex meetings.
    • mschuster91 7y ago
      On the other hand they're in the news every fucking month because their products are full of intentional backdoors, unintentional backdoors, other security issues, and bugs.
  • discordance 7y ago
    Atlassian and Microsoft
• Havoc 7y ago
  For programmers maybe. Rest of the world not so much. Most things can’t be pushed through fiber pipes
• Barrin92 7y ago
  Alexander Pentland's book, Social Physics, actually had a very empiric approach to measuring the productivity of employees and compared remote and physical workers and there was a significant gap for remote-based work. The reason is that face-to-face interaction conveys significantly more information between people than any form of remote work ever does. The spontaneous, rich interaction and the resulting creative output of humans gathered in the same place is at least with today's tech, not possible to replicate at a distance. There's the anecdote about scientists making the most progress while standing at the coffee machine talking to each other on breaks and at least if Pentland's is to be believed the data bears this out. I think another pretty good example of this is language acquisition. Compare trying to learn a language through internet communication with actually physically locating to a foreign country.
  • mxcrossb 7y ago
    Yes it’s strange that everyone’s so eager to say work from home, don’t shake hands, don’t go to parties, don’t go to sports games, as if these were just arbitrary aspects of human life that we can discard. In fact, these are important social structures that evolved in human society for a reason. There is a real danger of unintended consequences here.
    • jlokier 7y ago
      It's not so strange when you consider that people are only expecting it to be for a small number of weeks or months.
• blazespin 7y ago
  You know, like the coronavirus, I don't think anyone knows exactly how this will play out. It's good to err on the side of caution, but folks should avoid predicting and speculating about things right now. Better would be to just wash your hands, practice social distancing, hope for the best, and encourage others to do the same. Making statements like this aren't helpful and just upset people, especially those who can't work from home. And there are a lot of people who our economy needs to show up to work. So let's all try to support them right now by not talking about things like this, OK?
• dntbnmpls 7y ago
  Every few years, we get the X will normalize WFH. I remember when oil prices skyrocketed a decade or so ago and the cost of travel was supposed to normalize WFH. Oil prices dropped and hence nothing. Coronavirus will be forgotten about in a few weeks/months. People will move on. Especially with modern news cycle where a new catastrophe or controversy somewhere in the world will distract the public.
• tanilama 7y ago
  It is too early to say anything.
• booleandilemma 7y ago
  What’s this obsession with working from home? Does no one else like going into their office and seeing people face to face?
  • gdulli 7y ago
    This site has its own version of Godwin's law in which as any submission gathers more comments, the odds go up that someone will draw a contrived link to remote work. I definitely like going to an office more than I like sitting home or at a coffee shop all day. It's important social ambience that I can participate in as much or as little as I want on a given day. And I'm not in the minority, though it can seem so when tolerance for going to a regular job is more implicitly assumed than something that needs to be posted about regularly.
    • loco5niner 7y ago
      > it's important social ambience that I can participate in as much or as little as I want on a given day. If I had this luxury, I would enjoy working in an office too. Unfortunately, I'm stuck in an open office plan without that benefit. Godwins law (the remote work version) on HN exists because the current open-office trend is absolutely hated by many. I would be interested to see actual numbers on the like or dislike of open-office plans.
  • txcwpalpha 7y ago
    HN (and the tech industry in general) has a bias for being introverted, computer-focused workers that, if they had their way, would spend 10 hours a day heads down with a technical task and no interaction with other human beings. They live in a bubble where they assume that everyone else is the same way. As evidenced by the comments in this thread, many of them have trouble understanding that other people genuinely do enjoy socializing with their coworkers and going to after-work happy hours, and actually dread the thought of spending their entire workday alone without anyone to gossip with in the break room.
    • sysbin 7y ago
• tra3 7y ago
  What is “async” communication that everyone is taking about? Isn’t that email/irc/slack that we had since forever? How are things going to change all of a sudden?
  • mac01021 7y ago
    Yes it is those things. We've had the tech since forever, but businesses have not embraced them as a sole or primary means of internal communication. If you make the decision to structure the coordination of your business around email instead of meetings, it can have a large effect on your organization's productivity. Depending on how well your employees do with written communication, that large effect can be extremely positive.
• _bxg1 7y ago
  Maybe this will be the turning point for universal healthcare. The current status quo is only barely tolerated, where many don't get any healthcare at all and most of what people do get is sub-par. If only a minority had it, there might finally be the political pressure to push through a total reform.
  • dboreham 7y ago
    Almost certainly an inflection point for "we don't need any government so the government can be made ineffective". Turns out people need government sometimes.
  • jobigoud 7y ago
    I don't know about that. In Italy the system is almost at / past the saturation point and they are talking about ICU triage by age (no access to ICU over a certain age). Some people in the comments were taking this opportunity to criticize the universal healthcare model. In the sense that you contribute all your life and then you are denied treatment. I don't how they will do triage in the US if/when it becomes necessary but I think some people still think that money should play a factor.
    • _bxg1 7y ago
      Meanwhile in the US some are being charged thousands of dollars for going and getting tested. Anyway, I wasn't talking about the care during the virus but the increased commonality of non-full-time employment, which in the US means you don't get health insurance at all.
• egypturnash 7y ago
  And the rich software people will put even less of their money into the rest of the economy, it’ll be great for everyone who’s doing a job that requires being at a particular time and place. Absolutely great!
  • kjgkjhfkjf 7y ago
    No, it means that they will put their money into local economies other than those of tech hubs. A good thing, surely.
• Ericson2314 7y ago
  Uber and co need to lobby hard for non-employment-base healthcare and other benefits. It's very enlightened, and very self-interested. The thing is I suspect bullshit jobs are the easiest ones to do from home. Once (hopfully!) non-labor-tied welfare and UBI break the oversupply of labor, we'll have less of those, and in turn the jobs that remain will be more intense, pay very well, and often require in person coordination.
• milemi 7y ago
  This poorly written op-ed, rich on bombastic proclamations and backed with absolutely no research, getting to the top of HN is a (chef's kiss) testament of a what a giant circle jerk this site is.
  • sjg007 7y ago
    HN like FB suffers from the same thing... we basically like a good story regardless of the truth behind it. Even facts have become opinionated.
  • aj-4 7y ago
    semi-technical prose and confirmation bias both at work here, what else did you expect?
• DecoPerson 7y ago
  The biggest issue with WFH is how poor peoples’ written communication skills are. Take a spoken conservation: - Person A says something - Person B thinks what they said is derailing the conversation - Person B uses body language and makes subtle modifications to their response (“Uuh.. sure. Anyway...”) to express their opinion of Person A’s behavior - Person A notices this and will begin to reflect - Person B takes the opportunity to actually say “I think you’re derailing the conversation, we need to stay focused on X...” - Person A learns from this experience Now take a written conversation: - Person A makes 18 points in an email (I find people say a lot in emails — especially if you include the assumptions of the author that are a part of each sentence.) - Person B reads the email a day later. - Person B thinks of 26 points of feedback they’d like to make, but they’re much harder to express. The bandwidth of written communication is higher, so the “derailing” feedback becomes invalid. Instead the feedback is “You’re saying too much, we can’t keep track of all this” but that comes across like “I can’t handle this many things” — which if you think about it is fine, but it’s definitely weirder than the in-person form. Also feedback like “you should use a comma here” seems pedantic, but it can be really fucking important to avoid miscommunication. - Person B gets into a fluster and decides not to give any feedback, because it’s too hard. - Person A doesn’t learn from this experience. I’ve found people that are very self-critical become quite good at written communication. I read my own emails three or four times before sending them, to be sure they’re easy to understand. Yet when I read others’ emails, the mistakes present indicate they didn’t read their own email even once. This is indicative of a lack of desire to self-reflect. Feedback culture is important. I feel a remote-only company could be far more effective than a traditional company if they figure out interpersonal processes that lead to results — feedback on written communication being a part of that.
  • AlanSE 7y ago
    Remote vs. in-office does benefit certain personality types over others. I believe versions of this parable you have happen a lot (in both versions), but the ultimate consequences are not exactly obvious. If you play it out the remote scenario over time, then what are the perceptions? Paper trails are dominated by virtual-loudmouth Person A. If anything, A might come out looking like the star of the team. Maybe Person B becomes disengaged and self-select out. Remote teams will start to look like a cult of Person A. Generationally, forum culture is big. As a millennial, I was in lots of confrontational online discussions as a youth, and enough other people were watching for there to be an audience. The art of flaming involves more emotional intelligence than people give it credit for, it can be similar to traditional debate. Those skills get redirected into the professional world. This is often good for the individual, but bad for the whole. It's pretty to take a healthy online community and convert it into something that only full-time rule junkies can survive in. If you're ever managing an online community, the most important feedback is what people won't share because of their filter. There are ways to get this information in-person that you lose going full remote.
• briefcomment 7y ago
  I really hope we see a dramatic drop in emissions, and lobbying groups, unions, or just employees in general can point to that as a real benefit of being more permissive with WFH. If this really improved emissions in Salt Lake City for example, I could see this pushing WFH from a being a luxury to being encouraged. Everyone hates the poor air quality here, including decisions makers at companies. Maybe this will give them a reason to back WFH to some extent.
• pwthornton 7y ago
  I agree that this will probably make WFH seem like an option that works for more companies, more people, and more jobs. I also think it might show us that we don't need to keep road building. Instead, we should incentivize companies to do more WFH. If companies that currently require people to be in the office daily allow workers to even work 1-2 days a week from home, that will greatly reduce rush-hour road congestion. The governor of Maryland, for instance, is trying to widen the Beltway and I-270. Both roads are mostly heavy traffic during rush hour. I-270, in particular, is relatively light outside of rush hour in one direction. Simply lessoning rush hour demand for these roads would greatly reduce congestion. WFH is a much cheaper and environmentally friendly option. It can also be implemented immediately.
• tylerjwilk00 7y ago
  I'd like to see the data on carbon footprint reductions associated with WFH. Also traffic related deaths would imaginably be reduced.
• jpm_sd 7y ago
  "Quarantine will normalize WFH..." "That's good!" "... and recession will de-normalize full time jobs." "That's bad!" https://youtu.be/Krbl911ZPBA https://youtu.be/Krbl911ZPBA
• melq 7y ago
  I’m surprised to see this post getting so much traction here. To me it reads as a bunch of wild speculation, written as if it were factual, with no real supporting evidence given. > Home ownership was a bubble that popped in 08. Health insurance is a bubble that may pop when AMZN gets in the market. Both of these assertions seem ridiculous to me. Home ownership was not ‘a bubble’, selling high interest loans to under-qualified buyers and then creating and trading a bunch of securities around them was the bubble. And the idea that amazon entering the health insurance market will somehow transform the entire paradigm of American healthcare is absurd.
  • JamisonM 7y ago
    I am not surprised by the traction, disappointing though. The distance one has to scroll down to find a dissenting opinion is indeed disappointing.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
• quotemstr 7y ago
  I think the shift to WFH will also crash tech industry salaries, probably never to recover to present heights. Over the long term, there's every reason to suspect that a labor glut combined with better ML-driven program creation will change "manual" programming --- the direct writing of program logic in code --- to a low-pay, low-status profession.
• dwheeler 7y ago
  Note: WFH = "working from home". Not all of us speak in undefined acronyms :-).
  • markdoubleyou 7y ago
    I found this irritating, too. I had to google LNKD--it's the stock symbol for LinkedIn. Made me feel dumb for not figuring it out from the context.
• redgrange 7y ago
  It would have helped to have three article state what wfh stands for
• ryanyde 7y ago
  I went to a taqueria today. It was open. No one there was working from home. The guys cooking work there 5 days a week. WFH is such a small percentage of the economy. We went to see our pediatrician yesterday - the full-time staff was there. Freelance has gone from 2% in the mid 90s to 3% today. Big perhaps in absolute numbers of people, small in terms of percentages of the economy. SF is mostly a bubble in terms of this.
  • JDiculous 7y ago
    Well yea, none of those anecdotes you referenced are office jobs.
• Fjolsvith 7y ago
  The Coronavirus vaccine will negate the need for WFH. [1] 1. https://www.livescience.com/us-coronavirus-vaccine-trial-recruiting.html https://www.livescience.com/us-coronavirus-vaccine-trial-rec...
• rb808 7y ago
  Most people work in factories, teach in schools, treat people in hospitals, clean houses, drive cars/buses/trains/planes, cook/serve in restaurants, work in shops or warehouses. Most people can't WFH.
  • buboard 7y ago
    i think the issue is that, of those people who can telework , very few do
• znpy 7y ago
  > But contractors are the future. I strongly disagree. Contractors are, by nature, traveling craftsman. If you want an employee to stick around, bond with the company and really envision... the vision, then a stable, permanent work agreement (read: contract) is mandatory. Otherwise be warned that the future will be a time of unattached people that care very little about the success of your company (besides being successful enough to pay them).
  • dchyrdvh 7y ago
    49 out of 50 states are "at will" states, meaning that "the employment can be terminated at any time for any reason or no reason at all".
    • mac01021 7y ago
      Which state is not?
• shahbaby 7y ago
  As much as I love WFH, the truth is that people will be more committed to their job if they're on site.
  • humbleMouse 7y ago
    This is total bs and completely dependent on the context and person. I personally would give 500% more effort and be 1000% more loyal to a company let me wfh.
  • loco5niner 7y ago
    > The truth is that people will be more committed to their job if they're on site. I would be way more committed to my job if they gave me the flexibility to work from home.
• markus_zhang 7y ago
  We are already moving into temp WFH and I'm really scared that a near future recession will hit us hard.
• sigzero 7y ago
  I really don't think it will do either.
• dchyrdvh 7y ago
  And once these expensive SW engineers get the pay cut, they'll start defaulting on their expensive mortgages. A year from now? The software industry consists has the organizational layer - all these managers and vps - that relies on face to face communications, and the technical layer - all these engineers and devops - who can work remotely. The former will stay and retain their high pay. The latter will be outsourced at a fraction of the current price.
  • smileysteve 7y ago
    If the financial correction continues (with the 10 year note selling for so low), this pandemic has a likelihood of preventing fundraising in the near term.
• A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
  Maybe? My last chat with a random recruiter ended when I asked about telwcommuting since the place was too far for me and I am kinda spoiled now ( don't go to the office unless I know something needs to be signed or people might forget how I look ) ended since the company in question wants warm bodies in chair. That was 2 weeks ago. Admittedly, an eternity in market panics. Still, I will postulate that wfh isn't for everyone. It took me a while to get used to it. And I saying that while absolutely loving the benefit of not spending my precious time in traffic ( 45min to 1 hour ).
• newshorts 7y ago
  Remains to be seen. If this goes horribly wrong (I expect it won’t) then it may have the opposite effect. If things go even slightly well, I expect the lessons learned will at the very least allow companies to be more flexible in their hiring practices. Either way I believe it will open the conversation to those who previously shot the idea down. Any change is scary, but that won’t stop things from moving forward. The real issue here is neoliberal values and misplaced economic theory. Remote work can be done in an ethical and economically beneficial way.
• badrabbit 7y ago
  I don't mind wfh but it doesn't work for everyone. Not everyone has a quite home where they can focus. When working in a team,just having part of the team work in a differnt city by itself can affect team dynamics.
  • loco5niner 7y ago
    > Not everyone has a quite home where they can focus. Exactly what I say about my open-office. It's not quiet, and I cannot focus.
    • NateEag 7y ago
      You should read "quiet" here not as "free from sound" but "free from toddlers who barge into the office without warning and sit kicking the door if it is locked". My own kids are pretty good about this, but it still happens sometimes.
      • badrabbit 7y ago
        Or sick relatives, small house with a lot of siblings. Neighbors throwing a party in the middle of your important meeting.
      • loco5niner 7y ago
        I'm sure that is also a problem, but "quiet" still means "free from sound" and I very strongly emphasize that it does apply here.
• l8again 7y ago
  I see a novel playing out. A bird's eye view of the sprawling highways in a major US city shows them completely empty and lifeless in broad daylight. It all starts out by companies canceling events and conferences. The shutdowns also spread to concerts. Eventually, a gathering of any size, even live music at a local bar, is banned. This happens in a time-span of just over a month. Schools shut down and students are told to communicate over Google classroom. Families self quarantined themselves. The stock market wildly goes up and down.
• johnchristopher 7y ago
  I work in tech and IT and as a lead manager on some websites in a position between junior and senior and I definitely could use some wfh days but definitely need some office time with coworkers.
• nnq 7y ago
  It's from whoever wrote "The coming IP war over facts derived from books" [1] That's enough signal to make me not bother reading this. Writing this here to prevent other from wasting their time. Don't know the agenda behind, but can see the author(s) is/are trying to "pull" the Overton-window in a really really nasty direction concerning many things... [1]: https://abe-winter.github.io/2020/02/11/books-facts-ip.html https://abe-winter.github.io/2020/02/11/books-facts-ip.html
• adreamingsoul 7y ago
  I prefer working from the office and benefit from having in-person conversations. I also enjoy lunch with coworkers and having a space dedicated to work. That said, the flexibility of WFH is an amazing benefit and privilege that we have in the tech industry for people who primarly work on a computer. However, I can’t help but think of my brother who works in manufacturing and has to work with machines. WFH is not an option for him, and in his industry when people are sent home they no longer get a paycheck.
• adatavizguy 7y ago
  There are lots of recommendations for protection against coronavirus which are the same as the recommendations for protection against normal flu. If people are implementing them which is very likely, there should be a decrease in normal flu cases. We should be able to quantify how effective they, washing hands frequently, are.
• latrasis 7y ago
  Just in case anybody got confused, WFH stands for "Work From Home"
• lmilcin 7y ago
  As a contractor, I think this is... complicated. Quarantine may help WFH situation. For example, my bank is increasing their capacity to support remote which until now was 1 day a week at most. Teams also learn to deal with the situation which will improve my ability to be productive when WFH in the future. On the other hand it seems only a portion of population is able to be efficient when working from home. I find that very large portion of my team treats WFH as a kind of paid vacation where they seem to produce zero to almost zero. Will not join meetings and will be only available on Skype just to pretend they are available while in fact doing their own stuff. One just told me he can't discuss a problem with me because he's taking care of his kid. As to contracting/FT jobs, it is also a matter of choice. Most people value stability and they don't want to think about themselves as disposable. Maybe they would like to have career path. What I am saying is that being a contractor has its disadvantages which most people are not very comfortable with.
• walterkrankheit 7y ago
  WFH already seems pretty normalized to me. But the denormalization of full-time jobs/employees does seem like a real danger in any field at the moment. Unfortunately not all employers are ethical when it comes to that. If you're lucky to find one that is, stick with it.
• stared 7y ago
  Is WFH a commonly used acronym? A remote worker myself, I didn't know how to decipher that. (Spoiler: Work From Home.)
• newsgremlin 7y ago
  As a dev I don't mind coming into the office, infact I probably would never want a 100% WFH situation because I know I would get too comfortable to be productive when I need to be. But I'd like more days of WFH to break up the mundane office culture and burnout.
• fyrefoxboy12 7y ago
  WFH is a great option, but - having worked in that kind of environment for a few years - I much prefer working in an office. It's definitely true that I'm more productive when I WFH, but honestly, losing that human touch and spur-of-the-moment creativity, which for me requires human interaction (bouncing ideas off each other), is a bigger negative than the positives of getting my work done
• valkon 7y ago
  Is this page full with managers? Every dev wants to work from home, this is the dream.
• ojosilva 7y ago
  This crisis is going way beyond just working from home. Governments restricting people's movement and forcing quarantine is just the tip of a very deep iceberg. The astonishing decision to cut off Northern Italy was praised by authorities, without much regard to the chaos and the panic that ensued. There's a mindset that is dictating this is the right thing to do and very few critics. When is this going too be too much? I hate to be catastrophic, that's just not me as I tend to think crises will balance out itself eventually, or just fade away as vaccine, treatment, the summer weather (in the North) or the public attention turns to something else. But the picture right now is that we're sailing deep into uncharted waters. It seems like anyone, public and private sector, plain civilians or even mobs can now single out humans and quarantine for disease, segregating at work, schools, public transportation or any place anyone pleases. People are running for masks and hand sanitizers, but in fact it all does not seems too far from bank runs, a financial system shutdown and economic mayhem. The 2010 Public Health Service Act in the US gives government almost unrestricted mandate to limit people's freedom under certain circumstances (such as a new respiratory virus like the COVID-19) and there isn't going to be anyone with the power, or the courage, to dial it back. We need to find a way to 80/20 on this epidemic and get most effectiveness without herding ourselves out of a cliff.
  • edouard-harris 7y ago
    As of this moment, large-scale group quarantines are the only mitigation measures that have been shown to reduce the R0 of the coronavirus below 1. (The source for this is a recent epidemiological study of the situation in Wuhan: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.03.20030593v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.03.20030593v...) Given this, it's perhaps understandable that governments and individuals in the hardest-hit areas would be erring on the side of caution.
• danielvlopes2 7y ago
  I'm not sure about denormalize full-time jobs, but normalizing WFH is a good thing. It does require different practices though. Our company has a ton of training material on managing remote teams, and due to high demand because of the virus, we decided to make our eBook on "Managing Remote Teams" free. Maybe we can help ease the transition for teams moving to WFH. The 60+ pages book is the result of months of research and interviews with successful remote companies (it’s usually a part of our paid product). We collected tips on pretty much everything, from onboarding to communication best-practices, to tools you should consider. https://knowyourteam.com/m/managing_remote_teams https://knowyourteam.com/m/managing_remote_teams