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Zoom and Gloom
- aninteger 6y agoThis article is paywalled, which makes it difficult to read more than a few paragraphs.
- glaring 6y agoVery annoying, but there is a relatively quick workaround for those that don't know: On Chrome, Inspect the page and go to settings, then click 'Disable JavaScript'. Reload with Inspect open and you should be able to bypass most paywalls.
- cdolan 6y agoDoes this trick work on mobile safari where you can disable JS? Edit - It does! Go to Settings > Safari > Advanced > JavaScript, and turn the toggle to “off”. I’m sure lots of things you are used to no longer work when you disable JS. I’d recommend making a shortcut!
- romanoderoma 6y agoI'm reading it on Materialistic HN app The browser inside the app has JavaScript disabled
- boogies 6y agoWhy on Chrome? Works identically in Palemoon — and so I’d presume in Firefox.
- merricksb 6y agohttps://archive.md/H6XVX https://archive.md/H6XVX https://outline.com/DgaZfM https://outline.com/DgaZfM
- dschuler 6y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20201012172005if_/https://www.economist.com/special-report/2020/10/08/zoom-and-gloom https://web.archive.org/web/20201012172005if_/https://www.ec...
- codetrotter 6y agoFor some reason this page does not load for me in Safari on iOS. Safari says: “A problem repeatedly occurred on” and the URL of the web archive page.
- xmrs 6y agohttps://outline.com/DgaZfM https://outline.com/DgaZfM
- raiyu 6y agoWhile this pandemic will definitely create global shifts and city shifts, it's a bit unfair to look at the losses of service sector jobs and call them permanent. I'm sure there will be permanent job losses but the majority of major cities are no where close to being 100% reopened, and the public even in open cities hasn't returned to normal life. If anything what the article highlights is that it is easier to shift your job if you were spending all day on a computer to remote work, and a service level job can't do that. The V-shaped recovery stopped for service level work and basically shows to watch extent major cities are still "closed".
- merricksb 6y agohttps://archive.md/H6XVX https://archive.md/H6XVX https://outline.com/DgaZfM https://outline.com/DgaZfM
- dougmwne 6y agoThe list of companies announcing permanent remote work policy changes grows by the week. The hope for a quick return to normal continues to fade into 2021. On-site will certainly make a big comeback at some point and the Economist will no doubt write about it breathlessly. But things have changed and the future is not going to look like the past. The economy will redistribute prices and labor and there will eventually be a new normal. I agree with the article that we will eventually be better for it, but in the short term it will hurt many.
- ryandrake 6y agoThis "return to normal" narrative is starting to make less and less sense to me. It presupposes that there is this one special, immutable state called Normal defined as "exactly as life was right before the pandemic", and that we have to somehow get back to precisely that state. It's looking more and more like this deadly virus is going to be part of our lives for months or years to come, if not decades. So, instead of ignoring reality and trying in vain to get back to this idealized "ISO standard normal," maybe we are going to have to change our definition of normal. We're going to have to normalize things like WFH, wearing masks, social distancing, avoiding large indoor gatherings, instead of treating them as temporary measures. The world changes, and our concept of normal will necessarily change along with it.
- StanLindsey 6y agoI read it as returning to that feeling of normality. I won't think it'll go back to as it was before but when we as a society have high confidence in generally what we expect the near/medium term future to look likw, then it's a the new normal.
- wenc 6y agoI'm an optimist -- I think with the arrival of multiple vaccines of varying efficacies, potentially needing to be "boosted" or recalibrated at varying frequencies, coupled with cheap/fast/accurate tests and a supply chain that can keep up, I'm confident we can get to a state which resembled the previous in at least a few important ways: social interaction is sufficiently derisked that social gatherings can resume, travel will pick up again, large gathering places like schools can go back to in-person if not at 100% capacity, then maybe at 80-90%. WFH will likely persist. I personally miss going to conferences. It won't be the same (no period is ever exactly the same as some period in the past), but it will have some of the same qualities as the world in 2019. That's my hope.
- ballenf 6y agoThe chart showing worker's preferences seems awkward to me. At first it looks like "wow, people in the US really like working from home 4+ days a week." And then you wonder did they separate out "never" and "rarely"? The cynic in me wonders if lumping them together would have undermined the thesis of the article too much as it would have been a large plurality of all answers. Or to put it another way, 60%+ of US people want to work remote 2 days or less per week. That response lines up with my personal experience. While I like working from home occasionally, I don't want to work somewhere where I don't have a desk available 5 days a week.
- boulos 6y agoThey did separate out never and rarely in the original research survey [1]. Edit: The question was "In 2021+ (after COVID) how often would you like to have paid work days at home?“ (surveying "2,500 US residents aged 20 to 64, earning more than $20,000 per year in 2019 carried out between May 21-25"). The results seem to be: - 20% Never - 19% Rarely - 8.2% 1 day - 11.1% 2 days - 11.7% 3 days - 5.4% 4 days - 24.2% 5 days from the diagram [2]. [1] https://siepr.stanford.edu/research/publications/how-working-home-works-out https://siepr.stanford.edu/research/publications/how-working... [2] https://siepr.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/styles/page-width/public/Jun2020Figure5a.png?itok=Wi_iu95T https://siepr.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/styles/page-w...
- hinkley 6y agoI am on the road to developing a nervous tick around people in my house trying to talk to me while I'm sharing my screen in a meeting. The mute button goes away from the screen, and the touch bar, and I just freeze up trying to recall where to find it. Is there a handy solution for this or am I just screwed?
- gbrown 6y agoGet a microphone with a physical mute button, or see if you can configure “push to talk”.
- gred 6y agoYeah, I love the physical mute button on my mike.
- toomuchtodo 6y agohttps://mizage.com/shush/ https://mizage.com/shush/
- easton 6y agoAlt+A in Zoom will mute it, I think it works if you aren’t in focus (although I can’t remember).
- sojsurf 6y agoI recently learned that if you mute yourself in Zoom, the space bar acts as a push-to-talk button.
- mega_dingus 6y agoYou're hosed if you're switching focus away from Zoom (i.e. presenting). The keyboard shortcuts (Alt-A or holding-space-to-unmute) only work when Zoom is in focus I have 2 monitors, and drag the zoom controls to the non-presenting screen Getting a headset with a physical mic is probably your best bet Side note: noise-cancelling headphones are way more useful than you'd think. I delayed for 5 months before buying them, and regret every minute I didn't do it earlier. Doesn't help with the mic, but I didn't realize how much extraneous household noises contributed to my malaise.
- zwieback 6y agoI wonder how Covid will affect labor mobility for white-collar jobs. Driving past the company logo each morning and being surrounded by corporate imagery all day must have some kind of effect.
- kelnos 6y agoI feel like most surveys on this topic are not going to be a reflection of reality. People are tired of being at home for a variety of reasons, including child-care difficulties and their inability to do much/any socializing outside the home, plus added COVID-related friction when doing normal chores like grocery trips. These stress points make people associate these unrelated negative things with "working from home", which, in normal times, need not be quite the negative experience. Sure, there are valid reasons to prefer working in an office: lack of a workspace at home, desire for professional social interaction, desire to separate work life and home life, etc. But I think a lot of people who are so negative about working from home right now would be more positive about it if the COVID-related difficulties were removed. I'd like to see this survey repeated, say, a year after things go back to normal (or as normal as they're going to get).
- boulos 6y agoThis is actually a lot of Bloom’s point in all of this: this isn’t a good test of WFH, yet many people are already quite pleased. See my other comment linking to the original survey description and results (this was done in May, and I think even a redo now would be illustrative).
- lloeki 6y agoSample of one. I’ve been working remotely at my current job for a little bit shy of two years. The difference before and since lockdown is crazy: the company definitely got more remote friendly, but the external context weighs heavily. So to sum up: Situation A: I work remotely and things are fine, even though the company isn’t the best at remote (but working in it) VS, later Situation B: I work remotely, remote things are way better, yet COVID context creates wildly underestimated pressure pervasively Take what you want out of this but I made up my mind.
- pbronez 6y agoAgree. Everything is terrible now, but I’m optimistic it will lead to more remote-friendly policies going forward. I’m fairly confident my team would function best with everyone in the office two days per week and individual choices about where to work the rest of the time.
- neonate 6y agohttps://archive.is/H6XVX https://archive.is/H6XVX
- rossdavidh 6y agoAh, yes, the excellent track-record of predicting the long-term effects of unexpected shocks for which there is little data in recent decades. I'm sure there are going to be some long-term effects. I don't know what they will be. Neither does the Economist.
- vhiremath4 6y agoSome context: I am the CTO/co-founder of a company which has been remote-first since the beginning (one of our cultural values is "remote first") and has taken on the notoriously difficult hybrid approach of some folks working distributed and some on-site (in San Francisco). We've done this because our video messaging tool actually powers 100's of 1000's of remote teams around the world, and we knew we had to have structure and processes that resembled remote work if we were going to have deep empathy for the power users in our user base. In practice, this has typically netted out to ~40-60% of our work force being on-site or distributed/remote (e.g. at times 40% on-site/60% remote or 60% on-site and 40% remote). Some important things we've noticed: 1. Of the people who work on-site, many choose to work from home a couple days every week because of the cut down on commute, because they need to go heads down without any distractions whatsoever, or because they need to take an easier day and mix in errands. All of these points are totally legitimate, and I've found the productivity of our team is actually super high compared to full on-site teams. 2. When we absorbed any portion of our team, our communication processes ended up having to be remote-first, or we would see attrition/morale drop in the remote team members. This seems so obvious in retrospect, but I don't think a lot of the companies who will choose to do hybrid truly realize this. 3. People who have been working remote before the pandemic hit have universally said remote absolutely sucks given the current situation and they can't wait for things to return to normal. The normal they are talking about is still working remote. I'm not dropping in this comment to beat the drum of "remote solves all problems", but I can confidently say remote is here to stay (or at least some form of it) in most technology companies. In practice, this means those companies will need to set up their processes to be remote-first or they will see attrition of some of their top talent.