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I think the biggest wins from covid will just be that we did a massive 3-year WFH experiment and overall it went just fine. Great, even, if you account for the

I think the biggest wins from covid will just be that we did a massive 3-year WFH experiment and overall it went just fine. Great, even, if you account for the fact that it wasn't just a WFH test in isolation, it was accompanied by a generation-defining negative psychological and virulogical event. We all went fully remote for three years during a terrible humanitarian crisis and nothing exploded (except inflation but that's not our fault)

piva00 4y ago
Nothing exploded while most companies had no idea whatsoever on how to implement it properly. Things worked mostly fine even though it was through a panic emergency plan that was completely winged due to sheer necessity. Imagine if it was a plan properly designed and implemented? All this bullshit of RTO is getting old for me exactly because of this point, nothing was done in what would be even close to the optimal way for working remotely and things are still going ok...
yamtaddle 4y ago
Some parts of it were coupled with parents trying to homeschool their kids (for younger kids, at least, the parental attention required for remote school was high enough it wasn't too far off from simply home-schooling) while "working". Plus the extra stress of, you know, the whole being-in-a-pandemic thing. I recall some grumbling in those days about remote worker productivity and it's like, yeah, no shit, daycares and schools are all closed and households are all dual-income because game theory and zero-sum competition for housing/schools, so.... Those parts ought to be disregarded for any kind of lessons-learned from this, as far as the broader viability of WFH. 2020 through early 2021, at the very least, had some strong confounding factors going on which, one hopes, will not be common in the future.
twblalock 4y ago
I don't think it went "just fine". It looked like companies were doing well because we were in a bubble market. I definitely feel, and observe, a noticeable decrease in productivity and speed of execution compared to where my org was a few years ago. I know others have noticed it too, including management. On top of all that, companies are expected to run leaner than before because now that the bubble is over, apparently everyone remembered that having a sane balance sheet and making a profit are things that matter. So now we want per-worker productivity to increase because we can't hire as many people. The basic social contract of work has not changed. Tech workers have better pay and benefits than almost anyone else, and we should not be whiny about this. Most workers in other fields had to return to the office too.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  Times are tough.. let's spent what little money we have on renting an office space?
- tkiolp4 4y ago
  > Tech workers have better pay and benefits than almost anyone else, and we should not be whiny about this. Most workers in other fields had to return to the office too. So, if it’s bad for some, let’s make it bad for everyone? What kind of reasoning is that? FFS, we should be making progress, not the opposite!
  - twblalock 4y ago
    Define "progress". Working from an office is not some kind of dystopia. Quite a few people prefer it to other arrangements. Having a pandemic that forced people to work from home for a year or two does not change the fundamental reality of human social interactions.
mavelikara 4y ago
> we did a massive 3-year WFH experiment and overall it went just fine. Did it go fine because it was massive?

piva00 4y ago

Nothing exploded while most companies had no idea whatsoever on how to implement it properly. Things worked mostly fine even though it was through a panic emergency plan that was completely winged due to sheer necessity. Imagine if it was a plan properly designed and implemented? All this bullshit of RTO is getting old for me exactly because of this point, nothing was done in what would be even close to the optimal way for working remotely and things are still going ok...

yamtaddle 4y ago

Some parts of it were coupled with parents trying to homeschool their kids (for younger kids, at least, the parental attention required for remote school was high enough it wasn't too far off from simply home-schooling) while "working". Plus the extra stress of, you know, the whole being-in-a-pandemic thing. I recall some grumbling in those days about remote worker productivity and it's like, yeah, no shit, daycares and schools are all closed and households are all dual-income because game theory and zero-sum competition for housing/schools, so.... Those parts ought to be disregarded for any kind of lessons-learned from this, as far as the broader viability of WFH. 2020 through early 2021, at the very least, had some strong confounding factors going on which, one hopes, will not be common in the future.

twblalock 4y ago

I don't think it went "just fine". It looked like companies were doing well because we were in a bubble market. I definitely feel, and observe, a noticeable decrease in productivity and speed of execution compared to where my org was a few years ago. I know others have noticed it too, including management. On top of all that, companies are expected to run leaner than before because now that the bubble is over, apparently everyone remembered that having a sane balance sheet and making a profit are things that matter. So now we want per-worker productivity to increase because we can't hire as many people. The basic social contract of work has not changed. Tech workers have better pay and benefits than almost anyone else, and we should not be whiny about this. Most workers in other fields had to return to the office too.

ipaddr 4y ago
Times are tough.. let's spent what little money we have on renting an office space?
tkiolp4 4y ago
> Tech workers have better pay and benefits than almost anyone else, and we should not be whiny about this. Most workers in other fields had to return to the office too. So, if it’s bad for some, let’s make it bad for everyone? What kind of reasoning is that? FFS, we should be making progress, not the opposite!
- twblalock 4y ago
  Define "progress". Working from an office is not some kind of dystopia. Quite a few people prefer it to other arrangements. Having a pandemic that forced people to work from home for a year or two does not change the fundamental reality of human social interactions.

mavelikara 4y ago

> we did a massive 3-year WFH experiment and overall it went just fine. Did it go fine because it was massive?