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I fear that we'll come out of this with a warped, unreasonably negative perspective of several things that are actually very good and beneficial. Remote work is

I fear that we'll come out of this with a warped, unreasonably negative perspective of several things that are actually very good and beneficial. Remote work is one thing that might take a hit, because people will think that this is what remote work is like. I've been remote for 2.5 years now and this experience is not representative. I fear the same will happen to the notion of home schooling.

unfocused 6y ago
Agreed. Both are not representative of what they actually are because of the context!
keithnz 6y ago
I think now, a lot more companies will be open to it, and will be prepared for it. I know many companies who have maintained they REALLY need onsite, but now realizing that wasn't actually a hard requirement. I'm sure some are having negative experiences. Also I think it is actually easier with everyone remote rather than some in office and some remote.
- warent 6y ago
  > Also I think it is actually easier with everyone remote rather than some in office and some remote. I agree with that and would add that I think a huge part of the difficulty comes from a rift in culture. If a CEO does not consciously make an effort bridge the culture between remote and in-office work, it creates a strange divide that chokes collaboration and can even be catastrophic to turnover. Having a mix of remote and non-remote can work great, just keep in mind there's a particularly difficult dynamic that will constantly need management and maintenance.
  - mikekchar 6y ago
    Speaking as someone who works remotely on a team that is only partially remote, the pandemic has made my life considerably easier. Suddenly all of the water cooler talks have evaporated and I'm on an even footing with everyone else. A colleague was also saying that he normally hates remote, but he's been finding it quite nice this time -- because the entire business has to communicate this way. Still it's hard for people who aren't used to it.
- SamBam 6y ago
  > but now realizing that wasn't actually a hard requirement. There's going to be a lot of that. I know a couple people working in big orgs where major decisions like going paperless on certain forms -- which they had begged for for years, and had numerous meetings to work out how they could ever be paperless, and what the path to get there would look like, target dates, etc. -- suddenly happened one day to the next, because it had to be done. Will be interesting to look at business management changes in the future. What do decisions look like if you just say they simply have to happen?
markkanof 6y ago
Or some people will realize that remote work isn’t for them and others that hadn’t previously considered it will realize that it does work for them. I’ve been remote for 8 or so years now and in terms of work this pandemic period doesn’t feel different. So that leads me to believe that there will be other people who were previously working from an office but also have a space in their home that is conducive to remote work will decide that they want to continue working this way.
- toomanybeersies 6y ago
  That describes my case quite well. I'd still prefer to be in an office or coworking space, but I've learned that I'm still capable of getting work done at home. I might look at working remotely more often after this is over. My commute isn't bad, around 30 minutes (half of it's walking, which is nice to stretch my legs), but it might be nice to work from home just to have my own space and wear nothing but underpants for a day or two a week. It would also be nice to go on some "workations", visiting another city/country and working during the week and doing vacation things in the evenings and weekend. I've got friends and family I want to visit, but I only get 4 weeks of paid leave a year. Most of them also work during the week so it would be a good way to spend my time.
  - cameronbrown 6y ago
    > It would also be nice to go on some "workations", visiting another city/country and working during the week and doing vacation things in the evenings and weekend. I haven’t visited other countries, but I do working visits every other month when I see my family. Best benefit is keeping normal structure/routine while having more time to visit.
xwdv 6y ago
Really? Because it seems to me like the only thing people are going to realize is having kids to take care of 24/7 is a real pain in the ass, and maybe we shouldn’t be having so many. I’d say the majority of people who are still employed and have no kids are having a fairly pleasant time at home.
- tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
  Relatively speaking, yes. But even under the best circumstances, it's still draining. I just worry that it will color their perception of remote work.
evandijk70 6y ago
Just curious, what exactly is not representative? For me personally, I can do my work just fine, I just miss being around other my coworkers and having a clear separation between my work environment and my home environment. I look forward to returning to my office when it's possible.
- PeterisP 6y ago
  Given the context of the article, one obvious difference is regarding kids. For example, I had a good experience working from home before Covid 2-3 days of the week while the kids were at school and kindergarten; however, in the current circumstances the work from home is very, very different due to the need to combine it with doing childcare at the same time. I mean, consider evaluating the merits and drawbacks of working in an office during a mandated "bring your kids to the office" day.
- ghaff 6y ago
  >I just miss being around other my coworkers One outcome I expect will be fairly common is that some subset of people will happily rush back to the office as soon as it's safe to do so. And they'll find out that many of their coworkers aren't in nearly as big a hurry to shift back to the office full-time and will shift to continue working remotely a significant percentage of the time. Will depend on the company and the work of course. But I suspect that people who really like to have their whole team physically with them on a day-to-day basis aren't going to like the shift that will happen in many cases.
sealthedeal 6y ago
Tbh I’ve never liked homeschooling so that would be ok. But agree with you on remote work.
rjbwork 6y ago
I've done some WFH days each week in the past and been quite productive. I've been doing quarantine work for 7 weeks now and I feel like it's fucking with my head and I can barely get any work done. This sucks. I'm considering asking for a week or 2 of unpaid vacation.
- mikekchar 6y ago
  Getting into a good work pattern is very difficult. It's also hard to push yourself to communicate to the level that is required when you are at home. I've been working remotely for the last 5 years (and before that I'd done another 2 year stint a long time ago). WFH days are basically the optimal situation for a programmer I think -- you get some good time to put your head down without distractions. Full time remote can be like sensory deprivation if you don't know how to deal with it. One of the things that a lot of people used to say before the pandemic was that chatting on Slack is wasting time. However, without something like Slack your productivity can just go down to zero. To be fair, I'm completely happy with IRC. I'm also completely happy with email. But you need to be spending time typing out those thoughts and receiving thoughts from your teammates. It seems counter-productive, but it's really important. Especially because I'm 9 timezones away from my colleagues it's particularly tough -- there is nobody to chat to when I'm working. So what I do is just start a monologue on IRC. I start a thread (if I'm being kind... sometimes I forget) and I just type what I'm doing: "I've started story X. I ran into problem A, but I fixed it with technique T. Boy this part of the code stinks. What do you guys think about refactoring next time we get a chance? WTH??? How does B work? It just looks borken. Oh... Derp. I figured it out. I thought it did R, but actually it does S". This makes a massive difference. One thing it does is show your colleagues what you are doing. It also shows them that you are doing something. It also forces you to do something even when you don't feel like it. But it also allows your colleagues to join your monologue and turn it into a dialog (I wonder if it used to be spelled dialogue...). Even if they only type "LOL! I know, right? That code is the worst!" it's enough. Someone has touched you. Someone cares. In the best cases you get, "Oh wait! You need to do Y when you do that otherwise the data will be corrupt" followed by, "Hey, let's get together in chat and take a look at this together". Because otherwise you get your PR in and people are shitting all over it and you think everybody hates you (and they feel exactly the same way). In the absence of information, the mind imagines a hostile environment. I don't know why, but it just seems to work that way. So if people are not regularly touching minds, then you just end up getting more and more grouchy. Taking some vacation can help to get your head in a better place, but just make sure that you look at your work situation and realise that you need to change it to make it better. Thinking that you will work harder (or better) and that it will solve the problem is the typical mistake. Once you have a work habit that works for you, it will not be difficult. You do not need to work harder or concetrate better. You need to work differently. Hope that helps you out. Feel free to email me if you would like other pointers. The way you seem to be feeling is really common and I have a lot of experience with it ;-)
virgilp 6y ago
I honestly don't understand how home schooling is supposed to work. I mean, primary school maybe (though even there I seriously doubt the capacity of most parents, but whatever, we could handle that). But secondary school & beyond? Like, we're lucky that we can explain path, physics, chemistry, grammar to our kids & help them, but we struggle on some of the subjects (& gave up on others - e.g. chemistry - at highschool level). But it's one thing to help them on some subjects - and a whole different things to be able to actively teach everything: not only those, but history, geography, foreign languages, arts, music etc - that's far more than one full-time job! The only reason why teachers are able to do it is that they teach a single subject (to an entire classroom). Yeah, in primary school you (mostly) have a single teacher for the class, so home-schooling is plausible. But beyond that, I just don't understand it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- p1esk 6y ago
  Coursera
- cybert00th 6y ago
  Adopting homeschooling as the way to educate your children involves a paradigm shift on a number of fronts. You switch to being a single income family. One parent, most usually the mother, gives up their career progression for the duration of their children's education. Actual homeschooling isn't that difficult for the simple reason that there is a massive amount of resources available online - from distance learning organisations or individual tutors offering tuition on specific subjects, to distance learning organisations handling the whole curriculum, to mixing and matching DIY learning together with enlisting the help of distance learning organisations for more 'difficult' subjects - think Maths, Chemistry and Physics (the route we took). It just depends on how deep your pockets are and your level of commitment i.e. if the homeschooling parent is willing to put in the hours to prep ahead of lessons or they'd prefer to leave it all up to a distance learning organisation and they just act as the facilitator. We're currently putting our two girls through UK GCSEs, it's a mix of my wife teaching them English and a couple of others subjects and me teaching them Computer Studies, and us then also paying for online tuition in Spanish and the services of a local Music teacher.
deanCommie 6y ago
Before COVID, the only people I saw home schooling were doing so out of ideologic incentives. (Other than extreme edge cases). I see no issue with home schooling receiving a negative rep. Unless you're a trained educator, I see no benefit to home schooling children and depriving them of standard curriculums and socializing. (I'm biased having only experienced positive public school environments in Russia and Canada. Perhaps there is some dystopia with the American Public School system, but the root problem is America, not public schools)
- danielbarla 6y ago
  I don't necessarily disagree with you overall, but home schooling in general has one massive advantage over normal schools: the teacher to student ratio. There are so many things that happen when you are sitting in a class of 32 students that could be far better. Delays simply due to lagging students, teachers not having time to properly explain things, or get to understand and correct holes in their students' knowledge, tailor subjects to their tastes and interests, etc. Some random acquaintance who home schooled her children pointed out to us that their biggest problem - after finishing the government mandated curriculum for the day in 2 hours - was finding things to actually keep the kids busy for the rest of the day. It makes me wonder what an optimised education system could actually achieve.
  - zeeZ 6y ago
    The problem I have with this is the "teacher" to "person" ratio. It doesn't matter if the teacher has more time per student to answer questions and properly explain if they don't know the answer. It's lacking in depth.
    - dataduck 6y ago
      There really isn't any difficult material (at least in the UK) up to KS3. A competent tutor should be able to cover at least STEM alone, and I would be surprised if one person couldn't cover most of the rest. There's also the issue that in a home schooling environment, the student is vastly freer to just ask questions. In a school, there's a curriculum and a lesson plan to follow, so the only questions that get answered are along the lines of "how do I do (this thing you just asked me to do)". Another way to put that is that public schooling has the same problem, and institutionally at least the solution is to just discourage those questions.
dataduck 6y ago
I'm more optimistic. I think there will be quite a lot of people who try home schooling for the first time and are pleasantly surprised. Doubly so for remote work. Of course some people will hate it, but horses for courses.
PeterisP 6y ago
It's worth distinguishing between homeschooling and the current situation of "at-home schooling" or remote schooling, which is quite a different beast. My kids are being schooled by their teachers remotely, not by me - this process has little in common with "traditional homeschooling" other than the room it happens in, everything else is different.
screye 6y ago
> people will think that this is what remote work is like Oh man, this is the truest thing I've heard since the quarantine started. I loved that my team had a flexible WFH policy year round. On days with chores, I could stay at home and get some work done. I could travel while working. If I work up late or on the wrong side of the bed, I could avoid the trouble of dressing up and just login while brewing myself a coffee. But now, I hate it. I've realized, I love remote work precisely because I can work from the office the rest of the time. The loss of productivity, communication and socialization doesn't feel like much if it is 1 day a week. But, all the time. God No!
locao 6y ago
I've been wfh for the last 12 months and now people are telling me "you said it aint that bad, but it's terrible", and yeah it's been terrible to be wfh AND isolated. This should not count as a real experience for anyone.

unfocused 6y ago

Agreed. Both are not representative of what they actually are because of the context!

keithnz 6y ago

I think now, a lot more companies will be open to it, and will be prepared for it. I know many companies who have maintained they REALLY need onsite, but now realizing that wasn't actually a hard requirement. I'm sure some are having negative experiences. Also I think it is actually easier with everyone remote rather than some in office and some remote.

warent 6y ago
> Also I think it is actually easier with everyone remote rather than some in office and some remote. I agree with that and would add that I think a huge part of the difficulty comes from a rift in culture. If a CEO does not consciously make an effort bridge the culture between remote and in-office work, it creates a strange divide that chokes collaboration and can even be catastrophic to turnover. Having a mix of remote and non-remote can work great, just keep in mind there's a particularly difficult dynamic that will constantly need management and maintenance.
- mikekchar 6y ago
  Speaking as someone who works remotely on a team that is only partially remote, the pandemic has made my life considerably easier. Suddenly all of the water cooler talks have evaporated and I'm on an even footing with everyone else. A colleague was also saying that he normally hates remote, but he's been finding it quite nice this time -- because the entire business has to communicate this way. Still it's hard for people who aren't used to it.
SamBam 6y ago
> but now realizing that wasn't actually a hard requirement. There's going to be a lot of that. I know a couple people working in big orgs where major decisions like going paperless on certain forms -- which they had begged for for years, and had numerous meetings to work out how they could ever be paperless, and what the path to get there would look like, target dates, etc. -- suddenly happened one day to the next, because it had to be done. Will be interesting to look at business management changes in the future. What do decisions look like if you just say they simply have to happen?

markkanof 6y ago

Or some people will realize that remote work isn’t for them and others that hadn’t previously considered it will realize that it does work for them. I’ve been remote for 8 or so years now and in terms of work this pandemic period doesn’t feel different. So that leads me to believe that there will be other people who were previously working from an office but also have a space in their home that is conducive to remote work will decide that they want to continue working this way.

toomanybeersies 6y ago
That describes my case quite well. I'd still prefer to be in an office or coworking space, but I've learned that I'm still capable of getting work done at home. I might look at working remotely more often after this is over. My commute isn't bad, around 30 minutes (half of it's walking, which is nice to stretch my legs), but it might be nice to work from home just to have my own space and wear nothing but underpants for a day or two a week. It would also be nice to go on some "workations", visiting another city/country and working during the week and doing vacation things in the evenings and weekend. I've got friends and family I want to visit, but I only get 4 weeks of paid leave a year. Most of them also work during the week so it would be a good way to spend my time.
- cameronbrown 6y ago
  > It would also be nice to go on some "workations", visiting another city/country and working during the week and doing vacation things in the evenings and weekend. I haven’t visited other countries, but I do working visits every other month when I see my family. Best benefit is keeping normal structure/routine while having more time to visit.

xwdv 6y ago

Really? Because it seems to me like the only thing people are going to realize is having kids to take care of 24/7 is a real pain in the ass, and maybe we shouldn’t be having so many. I’d say the majority of people who are still employed and have no kids are having a fairly pleasant time at home.

tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
Relatively speaking, yes. But even under the best circumstances, it's still draining. I just worry that it will color their perception of remote work.

evandijk70 6y ago

Just curious, what exactly is not representative? For me personally, I can do my work just fine, I just miss being around other my coworkers and having a clear separation between my work environment and my home environment. I look forward to returning to my office when it's possible.

PeterisP 6y ago
Given the context of the article, one obvious difference is regarding kids. For example, I had a good experience working from home before Covid 2-3 days of the week while the kids were at school and kindergarten; however, in the current circumstances the work from home is very, very different due to the need to combine it with doing childcare at the same time. I mean, consider evaluating the merits and drawbacks of working in an office during a mandated "bring your kids to the office" day.
ghaff 6y ago
>I just miss being around other my coworkers One outcome I expect will be fairly common is that some subset of people will happily rush back to the office as soon as it's safe to do so. And they'll find out that many of their coworkers aren't in nearly as big a hurry to shift back to the office full-time and will shift to continue working remotely a significant percentage of the time. Will depend on the company and the work of course. But I suspect that people who really like to have their whole team physically with them on a day-to-day basis aren't going to like the shift that will happen in many cases.

sealthedeal 6y ago

Tbh I’ve never liked homeschooling so that would be ok. But agree with you on remote work.

rjbwork 6y ago

I've done some WFH days each week in the past and been quite productive. I've been doing quarantine work for 7 weeks now and I feel like it's fucking with my head and I can barely get any work done. This sucks. I'm considering asking for a week or 2 of unpaid vacation.

mikekchar 6y ago
Getting into a good work pattern is very difficult. It's also hard to push yourself to communicate to the level that is required when you are at home. I've been working remotely for the last 5 years (and before that I'd done another 2 year stint a long time ago). WFH days are basically the optimal situation for a programmer I think -- you get some good time to put your head down without distractions. Full time remote can be like sensory deprivation if you don't know how to deal with it. One of the things that a lot of people used to say before the pandemic was that chatting on Slack is wasting time. However, without something like Slack your productivity can just go down to zero. To be fair, I'm completely happy with IRC. I'm also completely happy with email. But you need to be spending time typing out those thoughts and receiving thoughts from your teammates. It seems counter-productive, but it's really important. Especially because I'm 9 timezones away from my colleagues it's particularly tough -- there is nobody to chat to when I'm working. So what I do is just start a monologue on IRC. I start a thread (if I'm being kind... sometimes I forget) and I just type what I'm doing: "I've started story X. I ran into problem A, but I fixed it with technique T. Boy this part of the code stinks. What do you guys think about refactoring next time we get a chance? WTH??? How does B work? It just looks borken. Oh... Derp. I figured it out. I thought it did R, but actually it does S". This makes a massive difference. One thing it does is show your colleagues what you are doing. It also shows them that you are doing something. It also forces you to do something even when you don't feel like it. But it also allows your colleagues to join your monologue and turn it into a dialog (I wonder if it used to be spelled dialogue...). Even if they only type "LOL! I know, right? That code is the worst!" it's enough. Someone has touched you. Someone cares. In the best cases you get, "Oh wait! You need to do Y when you do that otherwise the data will be corrupt" followed by, "Hey, let's get together in chat and take a look at this together". Because otherwise you get your PR in and people are shitting all over it and you think everybody hates you (and they feel exactly the same way). In the absence of information, the mind imagines a hostile environment. I don't know why, but it just seems to work that way. So if people are not regularly touching minds, then you just end up getting more and more grouchy. Taking some vacation can help to get your head in a better place, but just make sure that you look at your work situation and realise that you need to change it to make it better. Thinking that you will work harder (or better) and that it will solve the problem is the typical mistake. Once you have a work habit that works for you, it will not be difficult. You do not need to work harder or concetrate better. You need to work differently. Hope that helps you out. Feel free to email me if you would like other pointers. The way you seem to be feeling is really common and I have a lot of experience with it ;-)

virgilp 6y ago

I honestly don't understand how home schooling is supposed to work. I mean, primary school maybe (though even there I seriously doubt the capacity of most parents, but whatever, we could handle that). But secondary school & beyond? Like, we're lucky that we can explain path, physics, chemistry, grammar to our kids & help them, but we struggle on some of the subjects (& gave up on others - e.g. chemistry - at highschool level). But it's one thing to help them on some subjects - and a whole different things to be able to actively teach everything: not only those, but history, geography, foreign languages, arts, music etc - that's far more than one full-time job! The only reason why teachers are able to do it is that they teach a single subject (to an entire classroom). Yeah, in primary school you (mostly) have a single teacher for the class, so home-schooling is plausible. But beyond that, I just don't understand it.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
p1esk 6y ago
Coursera
cybert00th 6y ago
Adopting homeschooling as the way to educate your children involves a paradigm shift on a number of fronts. You switch to being a single income family. One parent, most usually the mother, gives up their career progression for the duration of their children's education. Actual homeschooling isn't that difficult for the simple reason that there is a massive amount of resources available online - from distance learning organisations or individual tutors offering tuition on specific subjects, to distance learning organisations handling the whole curriculum, to mixing and matching DIY learning together with enlisting the help of distance learning organisations for more 'difficult' subjects - think Maths, Chemistry and Physics (the route we took). It just depends on how deep your pockets are and your level of commitment i.e. if the homeschooling parent is willing to put in the hours to prep ahead of lessons or they'd prefer to leave it all up to a distance learning organisation and they just act as the facilitator. We're currently putting our two girls through UK GCSEs, it's a mix of my wife teaching them English and a couple of others subjects and me teaching them Computer Studies, and us then also paying for online tuition in Spanish and the services of a local Music teacher.

deanCommie 6y ago

Before COVID, the only people I saw home schooling were doing so out of ideologic incentives. (Other than extreme edge cases). I see no issue with home schooling receiving a negative rep. Unless you're a trained educator, I see no benefit to home schooling children and depriving them of standard curriculums and socializing. (I'm biased having only experienced positive public school environments in Russia and Canada. Perhaps there is some dystopia with the American Public School system, but the root problem is America, not public schools)

danielbarla 6y ago
I don't necessarily disagree with you overall, but home schooling in general has one massive advantage over normal schools: the teacher to student ratio. There are so many things that happen when you are sitting in a class of 32 students that could be far better. Delays simply due to lagging students, teachers not having time to properly explain things, or get to understand and correct holes in their students' knowledge, tailor subjects to their tastes and interests, etc. Some random acquaintance who home schooled her children pointed out to us that their biggest problem - after finishing the government mandated curriculum for the day in 2 hours - was finding things to actually keep the kids busy for the rest of the day. It makes me wonder what an optimised education system could actually achieve.
- zeeZ 6y ago
  The problem I have with this is the "teacher" to "person" ratio. It doesn't matter if the teacher has more time per student to answer questions and properly explain if they don't know the answer. It's lacking in depth.
  - dataduck 6y ago
    There really isn't any difficult material (at least in the UK) up to KS3. A competent tutor should be able to cover at least STEM alone, and I would be surprised if one person couldn't cover most of the rest. There's also the issue that in a home schooling environment, the student is vastly freer to just ask questions. In a school, there's a curriculum and a lesson plan to follow, so the only questions that get answered are along the lines of "how do I do (this thing you just asked me to do)". Another way to put that is that public schooling has the same problem, and institutionally at least the solution is to just discourage those questions.

dataduck 6y ago

I'm more optimistic. I think there will be quite a lot of people who try home schooling for the first time and are pleasantly surprised. Doubly so for remote work. Of course some people will hate it, but horses for courses.

PeterisP 6y ago

It's worth distinguishing between homeschooling and the current situation of "at-home schooling" or remote schooling, which is quite a different beast. My kids are being schooled by their teachers remotely, not by me - this process has little in common with "traditional homeschooling" other than the room it happens in, everything else is different.

screye 6y ago

> people will think that this is what remote work is like Oh man, this is the truest thing I've heard since the quarantine started. I loved that my team had a flexible WFH policy year round. On days with chores, I could stay at home and get some work done. I could travel while working. If I work up late or on the wrong side of the bed, I could avoid the trouble of dressing up and just login while brewing myself a coffee. But now, I hate it. I've realized, I love remote work precisely because I can work from the office the rest of the time. The loss of productivity, communication and socialization doesn't feel like much if it is 1 day a week. But, all the time. God No!

locao 6y ago

I've been wfh for the last 12 months and now people are telling me "you said it aint that bad, but it's terrible", and yeah it's been terrible to be wfh AND isolated. This should not count as a real experience for anyone.