3 ms·

Yes. Prior to 1995/1996 WFH would have been effectively impossible for 99% of office workers. From around then to around 2007 it would have still been fairly

Yes. Prior to 1995/1996 WFH would have been effectively impossible for 99% of office workers. From around then to around 2007 it would have still been fairly difficult for probably the majority of people. Since then, however, it became more and more feasible for more and more people every year. By the time Covid hit, the real question was why most office workers WEREN'T working remotely.

wcunning 3y ago
Entertaining to compare that 2007 mark (what I would have naively assumed) to the sibling comment talking about during Hurricane Sandy, which was ~5 years later and people still couldn't reasonably work from home. In many ways that was a lack of preparedness by IT departments, but to some degree it was also a lack of generally available and well developed services. Skype worked pretty well for phone calls in 2007, but it wasn't a MS product yet, so it would have been much more of an adventure to conference call a bunch of people for all hands meetings an the like.
- ghaff 3y ago
  I think by the time I joined my current company we were using Bluejeans but it wouldn't have been around in 2007 and not sure what was in place before. 2007 you'd presumably have mostly been using an audio conference solution and emailing files around. So it would have been clunky but the enterprise software company I work for could have presumably made things work but with more friction. Certainly I was mostly working from the road or at home by then. I wouldn't have been out of commission for 4 months assuming working physical IT infrastructure.
- DebtDeflation 3y ago
  WebEx was founded in 1995 and I recall using it at work long before Cisco acquired them in 2007. Even back in the late 1990s where I worked all managers were given a (voice) conference bridge number to use to set up conference calls. Outlook Web Access was first released in 1997. The first iPhone came out in 2007 and the first Android in 2008. WiFi was becoming fairly ubiquitous by 2003 and 3G by 2008. If people were unable to work from home during Sandy (late 2012) it was either due to an incompetent IT department or the fact that the hurricane knocked out power and internet.
ghaff 3y ago
Status quo bias is pretty huge--though I admittedly was mostly remote by 2007. I did go in more for a while when I switched jobs in 2010 but I've effectively been fully remote for years. But to my basic point, most office workers wouldn't have been able to effectively work remotely most of the time until somewhere between the late 90s and the mid 2000s or so no matter how questionable going to an office would have been as a matter of health policy.

wcunning 3y ago

Entertaining to compare that 2007 mark (what I would have naively assumed) to the sibling comment talking about during Hurricane Sandy, which was ~5 years later and people still couldn't reasonably work from home. In many ways that was a lack of preparedness by IT departments, but to some degree it was also a lack of generally available and well developed services. Skype worked pretty well for phone calls in 2007, but it wasn't a MS product yet, so it would have been much more of an adventure to conference call a bunch of people for all hands meetings an the like.

ghaff 3y ago
I think by the time I joined my current company we were using Bluejeans but it wouldn't have been around in 2007 and not sure what was in place before. 2007 you'd presumably have mostly been using an audio conference solution and emailing files around. So it would have been clunky but the enterprise software company I work for could have presumably made things work but with more friction. Certainly I was mostly working from the road or at home by then. I wouldn't have been out of commission for 4 months assuming working physical IT infrastructure.
DebtDeflation 3y ago
WebEx was founded in 1995 and I recall using it at work long before Cisco acquired them in 2007. Even back in the late 1990s where I worked all managers were given a (voice) conference bridge number to use to set up conference calls. Outlook Web Access was first released in 1997. The first iPhone came out in 2007 and the first Android in 2008. WiFi was becoming fairly ubiquitous by 2003 and 3G by 2008. If people were unable to work from home during Sandy (late 2012) it was either due to an incompetent IT department or the fact that the hurricane knocked out power and internet.

ghaff 3y ago

Status quo bias is pretty huge--though I admittedly was mostly remote by 2007. I did go in more for a while when I switched jobs in 2010 but I've effectively been fully remote for years. But to my basic point, most office workers wouldn't have been able to effectively work remotely most of the time until somewhere between the late 90s and the mid 2000s or so no matter how questionable going to an office would have been as a matter of health policy.