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This is ironic coming from Stanford, who is currently fucking up every single aspect of their handling of covid, as many Stanford students will attest to. Colle

This is ironic coming from Stanford, who is currently fucking up every single aspect of their handling of covid, as many Stanford students will attest to. Colleges are basically scammers at this point. The whole benefit of going to college is being able to meet like-minded smart, young people like yourself. Remote college isn't a thing and never will be. College is about people, as much as it is about learning. The unfortunate K-12 and college students are learning this the hard way. Personally, I don't think that remote is here to stay. I think working will be augmented by remote tools, but it cannot be replaced by remote. Humans just aren't robots and they need community, and work is the biggest source of community after college. To me, online college is a complete joke and is not what students after high school need. It's just not healthy. Humans need interaction in person, and they do their best work when they are working with people who they see on a weekly basis, especially young 20-somethings. This whole thing is becoming evident as people are starting to really just not care for the lockdowns at this point. Parks in SF are a complete shitshow because people want to be out and about. You will never be able to force them to be purely remote, and after covid, if your company is purely remote, you will not attract the best young talent, period. You might attract older folks, but you know you want young talent. This whole thing makes no sense.

ekianjo 6y ago
> Humans need interaction in person, and they do their best work when they are working with people who they see on a weekly basis, especially young 20-somethings. I dont if you have ever been in uni but in my time it was all about putting 200 students in huge amphitheaters with one lecturer not caring at all about their audience. It has to be the worst way to learn anything.
- ghaff 6y ago
  For me at least, university, at the end of the day, had very little to do with going to lectures.
js8 6y ago
Maybe good idea would be to have a community decoupled from business? In any case, you could still have offices as a place for people meeting face2face and do the most "thinking" or "creative" work at home, it's not mutually exclusive.
QuesnayJr 6y ago
It's not coming from Stanford. It's coming from three economists -- Barrero, Bloom, and Davis -- only one of whom is at Stanford, Bloom. Barrero is at ITAM in Mexico, and Davis is at Chicago (he does have an affiliation with Hoover). It should go without saying that a single professor does not speak for Stanford, or vice versa. For all we know everyone else at Stanford thinks Bloom is an idiot.
ithkuil 6y ago
You want young talent and you also want older talent. Mixing remote and non-remote cultures is hard but if done right it will outperform any of the two extremes you pick.
Aeolun 6y ago
> You might attract older folks, but you know you want young talent. A lot of the things you say make sense, but this sounds ridiculous to me. Why would you only want young talent? How about older talent? Skill isn’t age specific.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- anonytrary 6y ago
  I think we are misunderstanding. I never implied you don't need both. I just implied that you will most likely not have the latter. You need both, obviously.
  - ameister14 6y ago
    Why is it obvious that you need both? Plenty of companies seem to be ageist and surviving well
- Viliam1234 6y ago
  > How about older talent? Just guessing: older talent is less willing to work overtime and weekends, because they have a family waiting for them at home?
  - matwood 6y ago
    I used to think this, but now that I'm older and don't have kids waiting at home, I don't think it's the real reason. Older talent is simply harder to bullshit. Older talent also tends to have a bit of savings, so they are harder to push around.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
apahwa 6y ago
this is spoken like it is true for everyone, which is not accurate. I would have loved to be fully remote in my early 20s, free to travel and not focus purely on work. sure it was great for my career, but work isn't living. sure, a ton of people hate working from home. some personalities and roles require in-person interaction. most people never considered wfh when choosing their apartment or house and don't have good setups. meanwhile, there are also a ton of people, like me, who have always _hated_ going into the office. being constantly distracted by coworkers, dealing with long commutes, and putting up with uncomfortable and loud offices. yes, people need social interaction, but that doesn't have to come from coworkers. it is a very SF mindset to build your entire life around your work.. being in the office all day and most of your "friends" are coworkers.
- matwood 6y ago
  > yes, people need social interaction, but that doesn't have to come from coworkers Yeah, I think people keep conflating remote work with pandemic remote work. Pandemic remote work sucks. I miss going to coffee shops, 10am Jiu-Jitsu, and going to matinees with friends. I'm ready to get back to pre-pandemic remote work.
nilkn 6y ago
> if your company is purely remote Pure remote companies are likely to be rare. But we may see a proliferation of hybrid companies that maintain office spaces but allow certain roles to work remotely most of the time. I think your analysis here is one-sided and is ignoring all the major problems with 100%-work-in-office cultures. Housing costs are absolutely out of control in major urban centers, and newcomers are sacrificed at the altar of NIMBYism in order to make existing homeowners/landowners wealthier. People are wasting away commuting hours a day. Folks have been getting crammed into denser and denser open floorplans and bullpens for years. People are willing to put up with these things when they don't have any other options. But when other companies are investing in supporting hybrid environments and you're stuck still requiring people to relocate to San Francisco permanently, you're going to start losing talent. Not supporting some kind of hybrid remote policy is going to become a serious competitive disadvantage in the talent market. You can still maintain your trendy urban office space to attract the college graduates who want that lifestyle.
- anonytrary 6y ago
  I think you may be misinterpreting me. I am not advocating for pure in-person, I am only advocating against pure remote. I believe a hybrid approach is best.
  - throw14082020 6y ago
    Well, your 2nd paragraph does imply no-remote. Your 3rd paragraph softens the stance.
  - rorroe53 6y ago
    I agree, hybrid is definitely the best for most companies. Some in-person collaboration and socializing is always going to beneficial, even if rest of the work is done remotely. Having a long commute isn't that bad either if you only do it once or twice a week, so it gives people much more freedom over where they can live.
    - j4yav 6y ago
ascar 6y ago
I went to a German university and fortunately most universities here still believe that their job is to enable learning and that university is as much about learning to learn and learning to live than it is about the content. In contrast to school this means the motivation has to come from the students and there is no mandatory attendance. I for one was glad that I didn't have to sit in lectures that I can learn in less than half the time on my own. That I could structure my learning the way it best fits me. This however requires that materials are available in sufficient quality remotely. Not attending class doesn't mean you have no human interaction, there are tons of other options for human interaction like sport clubs. Your comment reads like attending in person is the only right way, while I think accepting individualism and providing choice is much better. So if after covid there is the option to work/study in person or from home, whatever fits the individual that day, that would be awesome.
- pantalaimon 6y ago
  > Not attending class doesn't mean you have no human interaction Well currently that's the case either way > there are tons of other options for human interaction like sport clubs. Yea but you won't meet people there who are into the same field of study as you are. At Uni you get to meet people who have chosen the same path as you have, often people very much alike you. You are working together on tasks, explain the materials to each other and have lunch together. You just don't have all that remotely. Also students usually live in a single room apparent, so it gets really hard to separate study and private live. I find it much harder to stay focused on a video lecture than on a live one inside a lecture hall. You could also go to the library to learn or work on a project if you want to avoid distractions, this is also not currently possible.
  - the-smug-one 6y ago
    You can separate the socialising and the educational parts of the university experience. For a large majority of courses I simply did not attend to lectures, it's a lot faster to learn on your own. Yet, I could have gone to the social nights that the CS chapter held every week and mingled if I wanted to. But yes, the lack of separation of studying and private living in a one room apartment sucked during Covid. Of course, in a regular school year I could just take the subway to my uni or uni library to work there. The bad parts of the remote experience will go away.
lez 6y ago
It is perfectly logical if your thinking is conspiratory, but on HN only logical thinking is allowed, so it really makes no sense.
mhuffman 6y ago
Speak for yourself! When I was young and starting college, I was poor and lived in a semi-rural area. So getting back and forth to all the classes was very difficult. Not to mention I had to work two jobs to support myself at the time. I would have fucking loved to be able to do my classwork remotely and just hung out with other students as my schedule allowed. Of course it was not an option back then. I have recently went back to university to advance my degree and it has nearly all been online. Much better! Frankly I met many more people than I did back in the day through the online tools and the fact that the classwork can be flexible around my life, versus the other way around was very convenient! I can see how this might not work for labs, but for most other classes it seems to be a very viable alternative. Also, I think you might be surprised about how much value people of any age put on being near other people at the time of learning. It obviously is very valuable to you, but I would expect you will find just as many that couldn't care less about that aspect of it.
skywhopper 6y ago
This isn’t “coming from Stanford”. It’s a paper written by three researchers, one of whom is on the faculty at Stanford. But that person doesn’t speak for Stanford and has nothing to do with Stanford’s policies in re COVID.
KozmoNau7 6y ago
I've been almost permanently WFH since April, with a few weeks back in the office during summer when the incidence rate was lower, then back to WFH when the second wave hit. I enjoy not having to commute, but I absolutely miss the banter across the desks and lunch conversations. I would absolutely like to keep 2-3 weekly WFH days in the future, which would also give me more flexibility in where I choose to live, I really want to move farther from the city and closer to nature. A longer commute would be acceptable if I didn't have to do it every day.
- b3kart 6y ago
  One negative is that such a hybrid mode still ties you to a location, albeit more loosely. Being able to travel and live in arbitrary (often cheaper) places is a benefit of pure remote work that many people seem to enjoy.
  - KozmoNau7 6y ago
    I know a lot of people want that nomad lifestyle, but that's not for me. Both my girlfriend and I have moved a lot during our educations and work histories, we would like somewhere to grow roots, have a vegetable garden, invite friends for barbecues, that sort of thing. Upholding a nomad lifestyle means it's very hard to establish and maintain friendships and we've both had to completely abandon several circles of friends over the years, due to moving. That's not something I enjoy.
- ghaff 6y ago
  2-3 days commuting per week, you still probably don't want a 2 hr. each way commute. Even 1 day per week that ends up being a day you sort of dread. That said a 1.5 to 2 hour commute once a week is doable but that still only gets you to a closer to nature location. It doesn't really give you the option to live in a different cheaper city if that's what you want--which is what many people (not myself) are looking for rather than a rural house.
  - KozmoNau7 6y ago
    A 2 hour each way commute is definitely excessive. Luckily the distances here are not as great as for instance in the US, so my colleague who lives in a town perceived as "far away" from the city has a ~1 hour commute by car. For comparison, I live 6km away from work (well within good public transit coverage) and it takes me around 35 minutes by bus. As a downside to distances being generally shorter, we also don't have the same vast impressive swathes of nature that the US and Canada do, plus historically we cut down most of our forests to maintain an impressive navy. However we do have some forests left and plenty of coastline, no part of the country is more than 50km from the coast, there is still plentiful natural beauty to admire. So it is possible to live closer to nature here, while still being not too far away from the city. In the long run, I may also want to get out of IT and do something less stressful and more "real", but that's something I'm still weighing the pros and cons of. There is also the consideration that by living in the city, I have very easy access to events and dining experiences, which is something I do still value, even if the pandemic has made all of that seem like the distant past. One thing I do know is that I'm not interested in suburbia. It's either apartment living or close to nature, I'm not interested in the small identical plots of land, cookie cutter communities, HOAs, any of that stuff. I want my neighbors either on the other side of a wall or more than a stone's throw away :-)
pts_ 6y ago
I learned more about working independently from reading linux manuals and irc chats after high school than in 12 years of school or 5 years of college.
jasonkester 6y ago
I don't know, man. Young You sounds like a very different person to Young Me. If my first employer had told young 20-something Me "I'm afraid we're not going to let you come in and sit in this felt cube every day after all. Instead we're going to ask that you fly to Thailand and work from a laptop on the beach from here on out.", I would not have reacted by explaining how work is a social thing that needs to happen in person. I spent the first 10 years of my working life focused on get myself into a position where I could do exactly that. As soon as it was even a little bit feasible to do so, I made the jump and haven't looked back. It's interesting watching the entire software world get handed young Me's dream on a plate, and seeing so many people wanting their cubicles back.
- konjin 6y ago
  >If my first employer had told young 20-something Me "I'm afraid we're not going to let you come in and sit in this felt cube every day after all. Instead we're going to ask that you fly to Thailand and work from a laptop on the beach from here on out.", I would not have reacted by explaining how work is a social thing that needs to happen in person. I'd kill for a felt cube.
  - amelius 6y ago
    You can create the illusion of a cubicle through VR goggles. Just download the cubicle app.
    - buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
      I actually hope that VR progresses to a point where one can work in it all day. The idea of having 8 virtual high resolution monitors set in any environment sounds awesome to me (amongst other advantages of VR). Unfortunately VR is still just way too low resolution for this to work today. As well as too uncomfortable to wear for 8 hours a day.
- j4yav 6y ago
  You've put it really well here. I lived in the south bay for a period in my 20s, but man, in no way was living in San Jose and working in a cubicle the social lifestyle that I dreamed of.
vishnugupta 6y ago
I don't think lumping together university/college education with professional setup will yield useful results. Everything about them are vastly different. Situations in life, demography, support system, primary goals, to name a few. Just to pick on one aspect; tools. Remote work tools are geared towards many-to-many collaborative activities. Whereas remote learning is primarily a one-to-many activity. Of course you have supporting TAs but still, it's about a very small set of people dispensing information/learning to a very large group students. At the campus, the physical presence naturally fosters a whole range of interactions besides classroom learning, as you rightly pointed out. Replicating that is just impossible online. Professional activities, however, is comparatively easier to replicate online, going by the evidence of how companies were able to go full remote just with a few day's notice. Uber, for instance, went full with just one day's notice. I was expecting a massive productivity drop. To my surprise, my team (I was a manager there) actually began shipping more features during full remote. Sure, it took ~2 weeks for us to find a rhythm but that's to be expected. All this to say, I completely agree with you w.r.t. online education. It's been a shitshow. Education is so much more than just learning. But please don't extend that argument to the professional life. From what I've seen, remote work is here to stay, at least I hope it does. People in India have been working from their home towns instead of being stuck in expensive and shitty urban jungles. It'll spur the much needed growth of tier-2/3 cities in India.
bjornsing 6y ago
> This whole thing makes no sense. I this is highly subjective and depends on how social you are, how much of an outlier you are in cognitive ability or interest and on what kind of social environments you have physical access to. If you are “middle of the pack” in all these aspects then sure, remote first doesn’t make sense. On the other take me as an example: I enjoy working with other people face to face, but I’m extremely picky in terms of sparring partners. Most people just slow me down. Some are even offended, probably because they feel a bit intellectually inferior when I get going, leading to unnecessary conflict. I’ve been looking for people with similar cognitive style and interests in my physical surroundings for 20 years, and I’ve only found a handful. They are eccentrics, often in high demand and not easy to collaborate with. There are of course physical environments where I would not be an outlier, or where I would even struggle to keep up. I’m not Terrence Tao. But I don’t have access to those environments. From this perspective remote first makes a lot of sense. And while I am a bit older now I don’t think it would have been much different in my 20-ties.
- cheph 6y ago
  > I this is highly subjective and depends on how social you are I am incredibly anti-social. I can't stand working from home.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
thewarrior 6y ago
I think the headline on this link is misleading. It only says that people will now work from home 25 % of the time instead of 5 %. A pretty uncontroversial view imo. It’s not talking about full remote.
dustinmoris 6y ago
> I don't think that remote is here to stay. I think it is in some shape or form and it will only increase, because it's a more sustainable way of life to not have to travel every day. Remote work means less strain on cities, less traffic on roads, less inflated housing prices in metropolitan areas and so on. > but it cannot be replaced by remote In many areas in can be replaced and therefore it will. > Humans just aren't robots and they need community Before open plan office jobs in skyscrapers became fashionable people had for thousands of years their community at home, their street or village. You don't have to be a suit wearing slave to make some friends. > To me, online college is a complete joke and is not what students after high school need Agreed. Remote studying is literally just reading a book on your own. Every successful self taught person has gone through that, but because they are intelligent they didn't have to take a student loan for it. They only paid a few quid to Amazon to buy a bunch of books. University is massively overrated anyways. It's not needed for the vast majority of bullshit jobs nowadays. It just serves as a mean of class segregation to identify rich people from poor when giving them a job. > Humans need interaction in person, and they do their best work when they are working with people who they see on a weekly basis, especially young 20-somethings. You can do this anywhere. I have worked remotely for a while now and I visit a lot of co-working spaces which are closer located to where I live. I don't have to slave myself through the rush hour commute into a densely overpopulated crammed city centre to please a master. I can get to a nice co-working space close to home at a leisurely pace without stress and still meet people, have interesting chats over lunch and make friends, be productive and get motivated in an environment. But I choose when to go there based on my personal needs. Some days I want to WFH because I need more headspace, or because I'm tired from a long day before and needed that extra half an hour sleep, or because I want to sort out an errand during the day without having to stress myself. Remote is the future for all jobs which can.
dcolkitt 6y ago
> You might attract older folks, but you know you want young talent. This seems silly. Why would any company prefer workers with less experience. If anything, I think you’ve got the causation backwards. Hot startups are full of young engineers, because they need to be located in dense metro hubs of talent. These areas heavily skew young, because people with families flee HCoL areas. The competitive advantage of a 25 year old is their willingness to live in a studio apartment. Now that the we’ve built the technology and culture for fully remote companies, this calculus no longer applies. You can assemble a team of people on a globally unconstrained talent pool. Frankly, there’s no reason to expect a startup filled with 25 year olds to outcompete one with ten times the cumulative experience.
- schnable 6y ago
  I mostly agree with this, but startups also benefit from people willing to take a lower salary in exchange for equity (or maybe just lower salary in general), and willing to work very long hours. That will always favor young people without families.
yarky 6y ago
Indeed, cubicles make no sense. Being able to work remotely is a competitive advantage and those for whom the physical office is a must will have to fight hard for it.
pelasaco 6y ago
> Remote college isn't a thing and never will be Is so wrong as "Remote working isn't a thing and never will be" There are a lot of people that are interested in Remote studing. Sure it's not for everyone, sure not always 100% of the time, but I guess it would work pretty well and I personally would love to see "Remote college" becoming a thing.
belorn 6y ago
It hard to see the greatness in having someone else impose who your friends should be and where you should sit for about 50% of your awaken hours. Then we have the added stress from places with open space/cubicle with poor sound isolation, people walking behind you, and constant interruption for which you have zero control over. Young 20-something Me could only really manage that with a corner chair and with headphones that blasted music so loud that people on the other side of the room complained. I could however imagine a situation where I would enjoy the situation if given enough changes. If I were the group leader and decided who I worked with then the first problem goes mostly away. If the work I did was mostly social then the problem of noises and interruptions goes mostly away, and I might even want it to be a open space plan so I can walk around and stand behind my employees and check what they are doing. Doing that remotely would be much harder.
hshshs2 6y ago
It’s little sad the americans primary source of community is work... maybe remote work can help y’all fix your priorities
ilaksh 6y ago
Being locked down and not about to go out and working remotely are two different things. They just happen to be coincident at this time. Also, I am sure that Stanford online is disappointing compared to in person. But there are ways to improve the social aspects with software. The particular configuration of the software and how it's used will make a huge difference in the types or amount of online social interactions. For example, if you want you can create a virtual dorm room in Gary's Mod or Rec Room VR and get your friends to log into it at lunch and dinner. But the fact that they aren't forced to interact with you because they are physically in the same space does not seem like it should be the only factor.
llaolleh 6y ago
If I was a college student during covid, I would opt for that year off. I totally agree with you that college is a social experience. In terms of work, however, I think it depends on the organization and people's stage of life. If you already have a family, then WFH is much better to me and worth the tradeoff. Imagine being able to spend 2-3 hours with your young kid everyday at the cost of less face time with your coworkers.

ekianjo 6y ago

> Humans need interaction in person, and they do their best work when they are working with people who they see on a weekly basis, especially young 20-somethings. I dont if you have ever been in uni but in my time it was all about putting 200 students in huge amphitheaters with one lecturer not caring at all about their audience. It has to be the worst way to learn anything.

ghaff 6y ago
For me at least, university, at the end of the day, had very little to do with going to lectures.

js8 6y ago

Maybe good idea would be to have a community decoupled from business? In any case, you could still have offices as a place for people meeting face2face and do the most "thinking" or "creative" work at home, it's not mutually exclusive.

QuesnayJr 6y ago

It's not coming from Stanford. It's coming from three economists -- Barrero, Bloom, and Davis -- only one of whom is at Stanford, Bloom. Barrero is at ITAM in Mexico, and Davis is at Chicago (he does have an affiliation with Hoover). It should go without saying that a single professor does not speak for Stanford, or vice versa. For all we know everyone else at Stanford thinks Bloom is an idiot.

ithkuil 6y ago

You want young talent and you also want older talent. Mixing remote and non-remote cultures is hard but if done right it will outperform any of the two extremes you pick.

Aeolun 6y ago

> You might attract older folks, but you know you want young talent. A lot of the things you say make sense, but this sounds ridiculous to me. Why would you only want young talent? How about older talent? Skill isn’t age specific.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
anonytrary 6y ago
I think we are misunderstanding. I never implied you don't need both. I just implied that you will most likely not have the latter. You need both, obviously.
- ameister14 6y ago
  Why is it obvious that you need both? Plenty of companies seem to be ageist and surviving well
Viliam1234 6y ago
> How about older talent? Just guessing: older talent is less willing to work overtime and weekends, because they have a family waiting for them at home?
- matwood 6y ago
  I used to think this, but now that I'm older and don't have kids waiting at home, I don't think it's the real reason. Older talent is simply harder to bullshit. Older talent also tends to have a bit of savings, so they are harder to push around.
deleted 6y ago
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apahwa 6y ago

this is spoken like it is true for everyone, which is not accurate. I would have loved to be fully remote in my early 20s, free to travel and not focus purely on work. sure it was great for my career, but work isn't living. sure, a ton of people hate working from home. some personalities and roles require in-person interaction. most people never considered wfh when choosing their apartment or house and don't have good setups. meanwhile, there are also a ton of people, like me, who have always _hated_ going into the office. being constantly distracted by coworkers, dealing with long commutes, and putting up with uncomfortable and loud offices. yes, people need social interaction, but that doesn't have to come from coworkers. it is a very SF mindset to build your entire life around your work.. being in the office all day and most of your "friends" are coworkers.

matwood 6y ago
> yes, people need social interaction, but that doesn't have to come from coworkers Yeah, I think people keep conflating remote work with pandemic remote work. Pandemic remote work sucks. I miss going to coffee shops, 10am Jiu-Jitsu, and going to matinees with friends. I'm ready to get back to pre-pandemic remote work.

nilkn 6y ago

> if your company is purely remote Pure remote companies are likely to be rare. But we may see a proliferation of hybrid companies that maintain office spaces but allow certain roles to work remotely most of the time. I think your analysis here is one-sided and is ignoring all the major problems with 100%-work-in-office cultures. Housing costs are absolutely out of control in major urban centers, and newcomers are sacrificed at the altar of NIMBYism in order to make existing homeowners/landowners wealthier. People are wasting away commuting hours a day. Folks have been getting crammed into denser and denser open floorplans and bullpens for years. People are willing to put up with these things when they don't have any other options. But when other companies are investing in supporting hybrid environments and you're stuck still requiring people to relocate to San Francisco permanently, you're going to start losing talent. Not supporting some kind of hybrid remote policy is going to become a serious competitive disadvantage in the talent market. You can still maintain your trendy urban office space to attract the college graduates who want that lifestyle.

anonytrary 6y ago
I think you may be misinterpreting me. I am not advocating for pure in-person, I am only advocating against pure remote. I believe a hybrid approach is best.
- throw14082020 6y ago
  Well, your 2nd paragraph does imply no-remote. Your 3rd paragraph softens the stance.
- rorroe53 6y ago
  I agree, hybrid is definitely the best for most companies. Some in-person collaboration and socializing is always going to beneficial, even if rest of the work is done remotely. Having a long commute isn't that bad either if you only do it once or twice a week, so it gives people much more freedom over where they can live.
  - j4yav 6y ago

ascar 6y ago

I went to a German university and fortunately most universities here still believe that their job is to enable learning and that university is as much about learning to learn and learning to live than it is about the content. In contrast to school this means the motivation has to come from the students and there is no mandatory attendance. I for one was glad that I didn't have to sit in lectures that I can learn in less than half the time on my own. That I could structure my learning the way it best fits me. This however requires that materials are available in sufficient quality remotely. Not attending class doesn't mean you have no human interaction, there are tons of other options for human interaction like sport clubs. Your comment reads like attending in person is the only right way, while I think accepting individualism and providing choice is much better. So if after covid there is the option to work/study in person or from home, whatever fits the individual that day, that would be awesome.

pantalaimon 6y ago
> Not attending class doesn't mean you have no human interaction Well currently that's the case either way > there are tons of other options for human interaction like sport clubs. Yea but you won't meet people there who are into the same field of study as you are. At Uni you get to meet people who have chosen the same path as you have, often people very much alike you. You are working together on tasks, explain the materials to each other and have lunch together. You just don't have all that remotely. Also students usually live in a single room apparent, so it gets really hard to separate study and private live. I find it much harder to stay focused on a video lecture than on a live one inside a lecture hall. You could also go to the library to learn or work on a project if you want to avoid distractions, this is also not currently possible.
- the-smug-one 6y ago
  You can separate the socialising and the educational parts of the university experience. For a large majority of courses I simply did not attend to lectures, it's a lot faster to learn on your own. Yet, I could have gone to the social nights that the CS chapter held every week and mingled if I wanted to. But yes, the lack of separation of studying and private living in a one room apartment sucked during Covid. Of course, in a regular school year I could just take the subway to my uni or uni library to work there. The bad parts of the remote experience will go away.

lez 6y ago

It is perfectly logical if your thinking is conspiratory, but on HN only logical thinking is allowed, so it really makes no sense.

mhuffman 6y ago

Speak for yourself! When I was young and starting college, I was poor and lived in a semi-rural area. So getting back and forth to all the classes was very difficult. Not to mention I had to work two jobs to support myself at the time. I would have fucking loved to be able to do my classwork remotely and just hung out with other students as my schedule allowed. Of course it was not an option back then. I have recently went back to university to advance my degree and it has nearly all been online. Much better! Frankly I met many more people than I did back in the day through the online tools and the fact that the classwork can be flexible around my life, versus the other way around was very convenient! I can see how this might not work for labs, but for most other classes it seems to be a very viable alternative. Also, I think you might be surprised about how much value people of any age put on being near other people at the time of learning. It obviously is very valuable to you, but I would expect you will find just as many that couldn't care less about that aspect of it.

skywhopper 6y ago

This isn’t “coming from Stanford”. It’s a paper written by three researchers, one of whom is on the faculty at Stanford. But that person doesn’t speak for Stanford and has nothing to do with Stanford’s policies in re COVID.

KozmoNau7 6y ago

I've been almost permanently WFH since April, with a few weeks back in the office during summer when the incidence rate was lower, then back to WFH when the second wave hit. I enjoy not having to commute, but I absolutely miss the banter across the desks and lunch conversations. I would absolutely like to keep 2-3 weekly WFH days in the future, which would also give me more flexibility in where I choose to live, I really want to move farther from the city and closer to nature. A longer commute would be acceptable if I didn't have to do it every day.

b3kart 6y ago
One negative is that such a hybrid mode still ties you to a location, albeit more loosely. Being able to travel and live in arbitrary (often cheaper) places is a benefit of pure remote work that many people seem to enjoy.
- KozmoNau7 6y ago
  I know a lot of people want that nomad lifestyle, but that's not for me. Both my girlfriend and I have moved a lot during our educations and work histories, we would like somewhere to grow roots, have a vegetable garden, invite friends for barbecues, that sort of thing. Upholding a nomad lifestyle means it's very hard to establish and maintain friendships and we've both had to completely abandon several circles of friends over the years, due to moving. That's not something I enjoy.
ghaff 6y ago
2-3 days commuting per week, you still probably don't want a 2 hr. each way commute. Even 1 day per week that ends up being a day you sort of dread. That said a 1.5 to 2 hour commute once a week is doable but that still only gets you to a closer to nature location. It doesn't really give you the option to live in a different cheaper city if that's what you want--which is what many people (not myself) are looking for rather than a rural house.
- KozmoNau7 6y ago
  A 2 hour each way commute is definitely excessive. Luckily the distances here are not as great as for instance in the US, so my colleague who lives in a town perceived as "far away" from the city has a ~1 hour commute by car. For comparison, I live 6km away from work (well within good public transit coverage) and it takes me around 35 minutes by bus. As a downside to distances being generally shorter, we also don't have the same vast impressive swathes of nature that the US and Canada do, plus historically we cut down most of our forests to maintain an impressive navy. However we do have some forests left and plenty of coastline, no part of the country is more than 50km from the coast, there is still plentiful natural beauty to admire. So it is possible to live closer to nature here, while still being not too far away from the city. In the long run, I may also want to get out of IT and do something less stressful and more "real", but that's something I'm still weighing the pros and cons of. There is also the consideration that by living in the city, I have very easy access to events and dining experiences, which is something I do still value, even if the pandemic has made all of that seem like the distant past. One thing I do know is that I'm not interested in suburbia. It's either apartment living or close to nature, I'm not interested in the small identical plots of land, cookie cutter communities, HOAs, any of that stuff. I want my neighbors either on the other side of a wall or more than a stone's throw away :-)

pts_ 6y ago

I learned more about working independently from reading linux manuals and irc chats after high school than in 12 years of school or 5 years of college.

jasonkester 6y ago

I don't know, man. Young You sounds like a very different person to Young Me. If my first employer had told young 20-something Me "I'm afraid we're not going to let you come in and sit in this felt cube every day after all. Instead we're going to ask that you fly to Thailand and work from a laptop on the beach from here on out.", I would not have reacted by explaining how work is a social thing that needs to happen in person. I spent the first 10 years of my working life focused on get myself into a position where I could do exactly that. As soon as it was even a little bit feasible to do so, I made the jump and haven't looked back. It's interesting watching the entire software world get handed young Me's dream on a plate, and seeing so many people wanting their cubicles back.

konjin 6y ago
>If my first employer had told young 20-something Me "I'm afraid we're not going to let you come in and sit in this felt cube every day after all. Instead we're going to ask that you fly to Thailand and work from a laptop on the beach from here on out.", I would not have reacted by explaining how work is a social thing that needs to happen in person. I'd kill for a felt cube.
- amelius 6y ago
  You can create the illusion of a cubicle through VR goggles. Just download the cubicle app.
  - buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
    I actually hope that VR progresses to a point where one can work in it all day. The idea of having 8 virtual high resolution monitors set in any environment sounds awesome to me (amongst other advantages of VR). Unfortunately VR is still just way too low resolution for this to work today. As well as too uncomfortable to wear for 8 hours a day.
j4yav 6y ago
You've put it really well here. I lived in the south bay for a period in my 20s, but man, in no way was living in San Jose and working in a cubicle the social lifestyle that I dreamed of.

vishnugupta 6y ago

I don't think lumping together university/college education with professional setup will yield useful results. Everything about them are vastly different. Situations in life, demography, support system, primary goals, to name a few. Just to pick on one aspect; tools. Remote work tools are geared towards many-to-many collaborative activities. Whereas remote learning is primarily a one-to-many activity. Of course you have supporting TAs but still, it's about a very small set of people dispensing information/learning to a very large group students. At the campus, the physical presence naturally fosters a whole range of interactions besides classroom learning, as you rightly pointed out. Replicating that is just impossible online. Professional activities, however, is comparatively easier to replicate online, going by the evidence of how companies were able to go full remote just with a few day's notice. Uber, for instance, went full with just one day's notice. I was expecting a massive productivity drop. To my surprise, my team (I was a manager there) actually began shipping more features during full remote. Sure, it took ~2 weeks for us to find a rhythm but that's to be expected. All this to say, I completely agree with you w.r.t. online education. It's been a shitshow. Education is so much more than just learning. But please don't extend that argument to the professional life. From what I've seen, remote work is here to stay, at least I hope it does. People in India have been working from their home towns instead of being stuck in expensive and shitty urban jungles. It'll spur the much needed growth of tier-2/3 cities in India.

bjornsing 6y ago

> This whole thing makes no sense. I this is highly subjective and depends on how social you are, how much of an outlier you are in cognitive ability or interest and on what kind of social environments you have physical access to. If you are “middle of the pack” in all these aspects then sure, remote first doesn’t make sense. On the other take me as an example: I enjoy working with other people face to face, but I’m extremely picky in terms of sparring partners. Most people just slow me down. Some are even offended, probably because they feel a bit intellectually inferior when I get going, leading to unnecessary conflict. I’ve been looking for people with similar cognitive style and interests in my physical surroundings for 20 years, and I’ve only found a handful. They are eccentrics, often in high demand and not easy to collaborate with. There are of course physical environments where I would not be an outlier, or where I would even struggle to keep up. I’m not Terrence Tao. But I don’t have access to those environments. From this perspective remote first makes a lot of sense. And while I am a bit older now I don’t think it would have been much different in my 20-ties.

cheph 6y ago
> I this is highly subjective and depends on how social you are I am incredibly anti-social. I can't stand working from home.
deleted 6y ago
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thewarrior 6y ago

I think the headline on this link is misleading. It only says that people will now work from home 25 % of the time instead of 5 %. A pretty uncontroversial view imo. It’s not talking about full remote.

dustinmoris 6y ago

> I don't think that remote is here to stay. I think it is in some shape or form and it will only increase, because it's a more sustainable way of life to not have to travel every day. Remote work means less strain on cities, less traffic on roads, less inflated housing prices in metropolitan areas and so on. > but it cannot be replaced by remote In many areas in can be replaced and therefore it will. > Humans just aren't robots and they need community Before open plan office jobs in skyscrapers became fashionable people had for thousands of years their community at home, their street or village. You don't have to be a suit wearing slave to make some friends. > To me, online college is a complete joke and is not what students after high school need Agreed. Remote studying is literally just reading a book on your own. Every successful self taught person has gone through that, but because they are intelligent they didn't have to take a student loan for it. They only paid a few quid to Amazon to buy a bunch of books. University is massively overrated anyways. It's not needed for the vast majority of bullshit jobs nowadays. It just serves as a mean of class segregation to identify rich people from poor when giving them a job. > Humans need interaction in person, and they do their best work when they are working with people who they see on a weekly basis, especially young 20-somethings. You can do this anywhere. I have worked remotely for a while now and I visit a lot of co-working spaces which are closer located to where I live. I don't have to slave myself through the rush hour commute into a densely overpopulated crammed city centre to please a master. I can get to a nice co-working space close to home at a leisurely pace without stress and still meet people, have interesting chats over lunch and make friends, be productive and get motivated in an environment. But I choose when to go there based on my personal needs. Some days I want to WFH because I need more headspace, or because I'm tired from a long day before and needed that extra half an hour sleep, or because I want to sort out an errand during the day without having to stress myself. Remote is the future for all jobs which can.

dcolkitt 6y ago

> You might attract older folks, but you know you want young talent. This seems silly. Why would any company prefer workers with less experience. If anything, I think you’ve got the causation backwards. Hot startups are full of young engineers, because they need to be located in dense metro hubs of talent. These areas heavily skew young, because people with families flee HCoL areas. The competitive advantage of a 25 year old is their willingness to live in a studio apartment. Now that the we’ve built the technology and culture for fully remote companies, this calculus no longer applies. You can assemble a team of people on a globally unconstrained talent pool. Frankly, there’s no reason to expect a startup filled with 25 year olds to outcompete one with ten times the cumulative experience.

schnable 6y ago
I mostly agree with this, but startups also benefit from people willing to take a lower salary in exchange for equity (or maybe just lower salary in general), and willing to work very long hours. That will always favor young people without families.

yarky 6y ago

Indeed, cubicles make no sense. Being able to work remotely is a competitive advantage and those for whom the physical office is a must will have to fight hard for it.

pelasaco 6y ago

> Remote college isn't a thing and never will be Is so wrong as "Remote working isn't a thing and never will be" There are a lot of people that are interested in Remote studing. Sure it's not for everyone, sure not always 100% of the time, but I guess it would work pretty well and I personally would love to see "Remote college" becoming a thing.

belorn 6y ago

It hard to see the greatness in having someone else impose who your friends should be and where you should sit for about 50% of your awaken hours. Then we have the added stress from places with open space/cubicle with poor sound isolation, people walking behind you, and constant interruption for which you have zero control over. Young 20-something Me could only really manage that with a corner chair and with headphones that blasted music so loud that people on the other side of the room complained. I could however imagine a situation where I would enjoy the situation if given enough changes. If I were the group leader and decided who I worked with then the first problem goes mostly away. If the work I did was mostly social then the problem of noises and interruptions goes mostly away, and I might even want it to be a open space plan so I can walk around and stand behind my employees and check what they are doing. Doing that remotely would be much harder.

hshshs2 6y ago

It’s little sad the americans primary source of community is work... maybe remote work can help y’all fix your priorities

ilaksh 6y ago

Being locked down and not about to go out and working remotely are two different things. They just happen to be coincident at this time. Also, I am sure that Stanford online is disappointing compared to in person. But there are ways to improve the social aspects with software. The particular configuration of the software and how it's used will make a huge difference in the types or amount of online social interactions. For example, if you want you can create a virtual dorm room in Gary's Mod or Rec Room VR and get your friends to log into it at lunch and dinner. But the fact that they aren't forced to interact with you because they are physically in the same space does not seem like it should be the only factor.

llaolleh 6y ago

If I was a college student during covid, I would opt for that year off. I totally agree with you that college is a social experience. In terms of work, however, I think it depends on the organization and people's stage of life. If you already have a family, then WFH is much better to me and worth the tradeoff. Imagine being able to spend 2-3 hours with your young kid everyday at the cost of less face time with your coworkers.