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Ask HN: do you make any distinction between "working from home" and "working from home during a pandemic"? I see a lot of people arguing that WFH is the new nor

Ask HN: do you make any distinction between "working from home" and "working from home during a pandemic"? I see a lot of people arguing that WFH is the new normal, citing long reopening timelines, their own preferences, increased productivity, Twitter's policy change, etc. But just a few years ago, IBM and Yahoo radically curtailed their WFH policies, and they made (what seemed to me to be) pretty credible arguments that the policies were being abused (WFH employees not getting on VPN for days at a time, for example). I wonder if what we've seen since March isn't really "working from home", it's "working from home during a pandemic", and there just isn't anything else to do (with the critical exceptions of housework and child, elder, and sick-person care). The current situation has actually been good/neutral for my personal productivity, since I'm more able to easily chat with my colleagues across the country... but why exactly is that easier now? Are they more available because they're working from home, or because they're stuck at home?

riffraff 6y ago
I am unsure this is the answer you were looking for but I do make a distinction. I've been working remotely for 10+ years, and the 3 months of lockdown were the worst I've had, for the simple reason that _my family was locked in with me_. I am sure remote working is not for everyone, but I like it. Yet, I live in an apartment, my kids can't go out to play and can't be expected to behave all the time, me and my spouse have to sync up call times so one of us can be on top of the occasional emergency etc. We're lucky compared to people who lost their job or had reduced income, but I'm not looking forward to more work-during-lockdown.
- Polylactic_acid 6y ago
  This seems to be the primary issue I see at work right now. People without kids are loving wfh and people with kids are struggling with distraction causing some of them to come back to the office just to work remotely with the rest of us.
  - ordinaryperson 6y ago
    I do not have kids and do not love WFH during lockdown. Simple things that would be a 30-second conversation in the office are now 30-minute Zoom meetings. Slack noise -- already a distractor to begin with -- has gone up 10x. If I have X hours at home or in the office I know exactly what limited amount of time I have to accomplish a task and can more easily allocate chunks of that time to specific needs. In lockdown it's like living/working in a casino with no clocks and no sense of time or progress and it's harder to do time management (IMHO). If I need something from someone in the office I can walk over and ask, virtually people have the ability to ignore you for days on end without consequence. I have no doubt that some people's personalities prefer this style of interaction but I hate WFH like this (in lockdown) or this much (months on end vs once a week) despite having no kids.
    - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
      >I have no doubt that some people's personalities prefer this style of interaction I think its more that other workplaces do not have this kind of interaction. I have found that a 30 second conversation might take a 1 minute call now but certainly a 30 minute call sounds absurd. For me time has stayed the same. I start and finish at the same time and I go for lunch for the same time as I did before. I don't have work email or IM on my phone so once I close my laptop work is done.
      - ordinaryperson 6y ago
        > a 30 second conversation might take a 1 minute call now but certainly a 30 minute call sounds absurd. It is absurd, but people do it. People are always late to meetings. Then 5 minutes of kibbutzing since many have recommended personal chit chat as a way to connect during lockdown. Then there are people who just want to hear themselves talk. It happens. In a normal office you could streamline some of these but in lockdown you can't. It's great that you don't have this experience. Consider yourself lucky. But I was responding to the generalization that people who don't have kids "love" WFH. I do not have kids, do not love WFH, and anecdotally from my professional circle my experience is not that uncommon.
chipgap98 6y ago
> But just a few years ago, IBM and Yahoo radically curtailed their WFH policies I don't really think those are the companies I would be trying to model my business on in 2020. > why exactly is that easier now? I do think there is something to be said for going from WFH being the exception to the rule. As someone who worked remotely for a year, I felt like more more of an after thought then. Now everyone is doing it and understands/are learning how to engage remote teammates. I agree the pandemic is tainting the results in a variety of ways, but I do think that companies were holding on to outdated practices out of stubbornness.
nsilvestri 6y ago
Although regular WFH and pandemic WFH are functionally the same, being forced to work remote has a different effect on me than elective remote work. As someone who prefers working in the office, mandatory indefinite WFH is much more...mentally taxing(?) than when I choose to do it.
kanox 6y ago
Personally I can't wait for this to come back to normal: being inside an office for 9 hours every day helps me be productive and focus.
- aianus 6y ago
  Me too, man. We can't be the only ones -- the library at my school was full of people studying independently despite absolutely zero external pressure to do so. I found myself much more productive in that environment than in my home and the (admittedly short) commute created a nice, clear separation of work vs. rest.
- Foivos 6y ago
  I guess it depends on your WFH situation. If you live in a big enough house to have a dedicated office room, probably it is better to WFH. If you live in a studio, where you do everything in a single room, then it is better to go to the office to change the scene a bit.
  - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
    idk. I basically have my office in my bedroom right now and I find it to be fine. I guess what helps is I already had 2 large monitors and a second hand high end office chair so I find this setup just as good as my one in the office just without the standing desk. I guess what helps is I live with 5 other adults so I don't feel like I am missing any kind of social element that I would have got at work.
- nafix 6y ago
  Same here. I live in a 950 square foot apartment. I can't stand being in the same space all day long. I need a change of space, and I actually enjoy working in the company building. It's a very modern work space.
- cmrdporcupine 6y ago
  I can't wait for it to back to normal because my employer has done an absolutely terrible job of making our infrastructure work well for remote development. No source code allowed on laptops, but my work is on hardware devices I have to sit next to. So I have to shell to my workstation to produce binaries, port forwarding to my hardware devices to push them over, slow slow awkwad... Part of the code base I work on is open source, so for my own sanity I'm mostly just doing that portion of work... but on my own personal (underpowered) computer. But not allowed to expense a new machine... Doing work for the corporation using my own assets... And forced to use a chromebook as my laptop, with its awful ssh support... Sorry, this can't end soon enough. But it won't for us until January or so. They need to fix this, or I need to find an employer who is competent at WFH.
triceratops 6y ago
> policies were being abused (WFH employees not getting on VPN for days at a time, for example). And they were still putting in enough work to not get fired? Maybe those jobs were really easy then, and could have been combined into fewer roles. Or management wasn't keeping track of how much work there was to go around, and hadn't maxed out their workers' capacity. Either way, it seems like bad management.
shadowfox 6y ago
> IBM and Yahoo radically curtailed their WFH policies, and they made (what seemed to me to be) pretty credible arguments that the policies were being abused While it is possible that they were correct, both companies, but especially Yahoo was already suffering from deep organizational and employee issues at the point these announcements were made. So I am somewhat skeptical about the cause and effect here. I would be more sold if this were coming out of a less disfunctional organization. > there just isn't anything else to do (with the critical exceptions of housework and child, elder, and sick-person care) There is also TV, Netflix and a variety of different ways to distract oneself at home. Though I do agree that working- from-home-during-a-pandemic may be different from just working-from-home permanently.
edw519 6y ago
pretty credible arguments that the policies were being abused Either you're getting your work done or you're not. Any other way of measuring abuse is management malpractice.
- RankingMember 6y ago
  Couldn't agree more. The point at which you start trying to tell people how to do their work and "oh well you logged on 5 minutes late here" and "oh well it shows here you always log off for an extra 10 minutes here" is the point you begin holding your workforce back rather than allowing them to perform at their best.
treespace89 6y ago
I feel the change that has happened is that managers _had to_ figure out managing remote workers. Before when remote work was not 'working' you could fall back to in person. That is not currently an option. So management has been forced to figure it out.
rezeroed 6y ago
I absolutely consider working from home different from this, which is almost house arrest. WFH I am able to spend time working in coffee shops, am able to use the outside world to sync my clock with everyone else. Being stuck on my own in a London flat is driving me nuts, and I'm introverted. I've been going to bed at 5:30am for no reason other than my clock has drifted.
bragh 6y ago
> (WFH employees not getting on VPN for days at a time, for example). This is a metric that should be taken with a huge grain of salt in the world of cloud services and bad VPN software.
dijit 6y ago
> employees not getting on VPN for days at a time Oh jeez, I hope this is not a metric I'm being counted by. Not because I'm not working, but because I avoid the VPN as much as I possibly can. It's laggy, prone to hijacking my DNS traffic and attempting to send me to the corporate http proxies (which don't permit self-signed certs or local access... have other issues such as TLS injection and randomly terminating byte-streams). I work my full complement.. actually even more so. But most of my work can be done via slack/teams+outlook if it's interacting with the organisation, and those things are externally accessible. For everything else: Excel/Word do not need a VPN and neither does my IDE- all my servers are in the cloud so... yeah, I'm almost never on the VPN.
ponker 6y ago
Oof... why am I not surprised that IBM and Yahoo were the companies evaluating their workers by "time spent on VPN." Measuring the productivity of software engineers is not easy. But it is as important to maintaining a high performing engineering team as measuring CPU consumption is to running a cloud platform.

riffraff 6y ago

I am unsure this is the answer you were looking for but I do make a distinction. I've been working remotely for 10+ years, and the 3 months of lockdown were the worst I've had, for the simple reason that _my family was locked in with me_. I am sure remote working is not for everyone, but I like it. Yet, I live in an apartment, my kids can't go out to play and can't be expected to behave all the time, me and my spouse have to sync up call times so one of us can be on top of the occasional emergency etc. We're lucky compared to people who lost their job or had reduced income, but I'm not looking forward to more work-during-lockdown.

Polylactic_acid 6y ago
This seems to be the primary issue I see at work right now. People without kids are loving wfh and people with kids are struggling with distraction causing some of them to come back to the office just to work remotely with the rest of us.
- ordinaryperson 6y ago
  I do not have kids and do not love WFH during lockdown. Simple things that would be a 30-second conversation in the office are now 30-minute Zoom meetings. Slack noise -- already a distractor to begin with -- has gone up 10x. If I have X hours at home or in the office I know exactly what limited amount of time I have to accomplish a task and can more easily allocate chunks of that time to specific needs. In lockdown it's like living/working in a casino with no clocks and no sense of time or progress and it's harder to do time management (IMHO). If I need something from someone in the office I can walk over and ask, virtually people have the ability to ignore you for days on end without consequence. I have no doubt that some people's personalities prefer this style of interaction but I hate WFH like this (in lockdown) or this much (months on end vs once a week) despite having no kids.
  - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
    >I have no doubt that some people's personalities prefer this style of interaction I think its more that other workplaces do not have this kind of interaction. I have found that a 30 second conversation might take a 1 minute call now but certainly a 30 minute call sounds absurd. For me time has stayed the same. I start and finish at the same time and I go for lunch for the same time as I did before. I don't have work email or IM on my phone so once I close my laptop work is done.
    - ordinaryperson 6y ago
      > a 30 second conversation might take a 1 minute call now but certainly a 30 minute call sounds absurd. It is absurd, but people do it. People are always late to meetings. Then 5 minutes of kibbutzing since many have recommended personal chit chat as a way to connect during lockdown. Then there are people who just want to hear themselves talk. It happens. In a normal office you could streamline some of these but in lockdown you can't. It's great that you don't have this experience. Consider yourself lucky. But I was responding to the generalization that people who don't have kids "love" WFH. I do not have kids, do not love WFH, and anecdotally from my professional circle my experience is not that uncommon.

chipgap98 6y ago

> But just a few years ago, IBM and Yahoo radically curtailed their WFH policies I don't really think those are the companies I would be trying to model my business on in 2020. > why exactly is that easier now? I do think there is something to be said for going from WFH being the exception to the rule. As someone who worked remotely for a year, I felt like more more of an after thought then. Now everyone is doing it and understands/are learning how to engage remote teammates. I agree the pandemic is tainting the results in a variety of ways, but I do think that companies were holding on to outdated practices out of stubbornness.

nsilvestri 6y ago

Although regular WFH and pandemic WFH are functionally the same, being forced to work remote has a different effect on me than elective remote work. As someone who prefers working in the office, mandatory indefinite WFH is much more...mentally taxing(?) than when I choose to do it.

kanox 6y ago

Personally I can't wait for this to come back to normal: being inside an office for 9 hours every day helps me be productive and focus.

aianus 6y ago
Me too, man. We can't be the only ones -- the library at my school was full of people studying independently despite absolutely zero external pressure to do so. I found myself much more productive in that environment than in my home and the (admittedly short) commute created a nice, clear separation of work vs. rest.
Foivos 6y ago
I guess it depends on your WFH situation. If you live in a big enough house to have a dedicated office room, probably it is better to WFH. If you live in a studio, where you do everything in a single room, then it is better to go to the office to change the scene a bit.
- Polylactic_acid 6y ago
  idk. I basically have my office in my bedroom right now and I find it to be fine. I guess what helps is I already had 2 large monitors and a second hand high end office chair so I find this setup just as good as my one in the office just without the standing desk. I guess what helps is I live with 5 other adults so I don't feel like I am missing any kind of social element that I would have got at work.
nafix 6y ago
Same here. I live in a 950 square foot apartment. I can't stand being in the same space all day long. I need a change of space, and I actually enjoy working in the company building. It's a very modern work space.
cmrdporcupine 6y ago
I can't wait for it to back to normal because my employer has done an absolutely terrible job of making our infrastructure work well for remote development. No source code allowed on laptops, but my work is on hardware devices I have to sit next to. So I have to shell to my workstation to produce binaries, port forwarding to my hardware devices to push them over, slow slow awkwad... Part of the code base I work on is open source, so for my own sanity I'm mostly just doing that portion of work... but on my own personal (underpowered) computer. But not allowed to expense a new machine... Doing work for the corporation using my own assets... And forced to use a chromebook as my laptop, with its awful ssh support... Sorry, this can't end soon enough. But it won't for us until January or so. They need to fix this, or I need to find an employer who is competent at WFH.

triceratops 6y ago

> policies were being abused (WFH employees not getting on VPN for days at a time, for example). And they were still putting in enough work to not get fired? Maybe those jobs were really easy then, and could have been combined into fewer roles. Or management wasn't keeping track of how much work there was to go around, and hadn't maxed out their workers' capacity. Either way, it seems like bad management.

shadowfox 6y ago

> IBM and Yahoo radically curtailed their WFH policies, and they made (what seemed to me to be) pretty credible arguments that the policies were being abused While it is possible that they were correct, both companies, but especially Yahoo was already suffering from deep organizational and employee issues at the point these announcements were made. So I am somewhat skeptical about the cause and effect here. I would be more sold if this were coming out of a less disfunctional organization. > there just isn't anything else to do (with the critical exceptions of housework and child, elder, and sick-person care) There is also TV, Netflix and a variety of different ways to distract oneself at home. Though I do agree that working- from-home-during-a-pandemic may be different from just working-from-home permanently.

edw519 6y ago

pretty credible arguments that the policies were being abused Either you're getting your work done or you're not. Any other way of measuring abuse is management malpractice.

RankingMember 6y ago
Couldn't agree more. The point at which you start trying to tell people how to do their work and "oh well you logged on 5 minutes late here" and "oh well it shows here you always log off for an extra 10 minutes here" is the point you begin holding your workforce back rather than allowing them to perform at their best.

treespace89 6y ago

I feel the change that has happened is that managers _had to_ figure out managing remote workers. Before when remote work was not 'working' you could fall back to in person. That is not currently an option. So management has been forced to figure it out.

rezeroed 6y ago

I absolutely consider working from home different from this, which is almost house arrest. WFH I am able to spend time working in coffee shops, am able to use the outside world to sync my clock with everyone else. Being stuck on my own in a London flat is driving me nuts, and I'm introverted. I've been going to bed at 5:30am for no reason other than my clock has drifted.

bragh 6y ago

> (WFH employees not getting on VPN for days at a time, for example). This is a metric that should be taken with a huge grain of salt in the world of cloud services and bad VPN software.

dijit 6y ago

> employees not getting on VPN for days at a time Oh jeez, I hope this is not a metric I'm being counted by. Not because I'm not working, but because I avoid the VPN as much as I possibly can. It's laggy, prone to hijacking my DNS traffic and attempting to send me to the corporate http proxies (which don't permit self-signed certs or local access... have other issues such as TLS injection and randomly terminating byte-streams). I work my full complement.. actually even more so. But most of my work can be done via slack/teams+outlook if it's interacting with the organisation, and those things are externally accessible. For everything else: Excel/Word do not need a VPN and neither does my IDE- all my servers are in the cloud so... yeah, I'm almost never on the VPN.

ponker 6y ago

Oof... why am I not surprised that IBM and Yahoo were the companies evaluating their workers by "time spent on VPN." Measuring the productivity of software engineers is not easy. But it is as important to maintaining a high performing engineering team as measuring CPU consumption is to running a cloud platform.