One pandemics and FAANG learns about advantages of remote work. I can imagine FB's productivity goes way up as people wouldn't need to share the same huge open office. Maybe they'll even figure out some useful ideas in the end...
Yea, the idea that Google simply hadn't thought of allowing WFH is idiotic. IME, they're well-aware of the advantages, but also well-aware of the disadvantages, and their current condonement but not overencouragement of WFH reflects this balance. In every job I've had (including Google), I work from home when I need to get well-defined, focused,independent work done on a fairly rigid timeline, and try and work from the office fairly often to take advantage of 1) easier conversations when complicated coordination is required, 2) maintaining social relationships with coworkers during downtime, and 3) the creative sparks that occasionally fly from casual conversation or even overhearing a conversation.
I was a wfh maximalist like many on this thread at the very beginning of my career, but AFAICT it just comes from some combination of a) being a junior engineer that works on isolated bits of work and didn't need to communicate cross-team much or b) having work that doesn't require much creative collaboration. As I got more senior and moved towards different types of problems, my appreciation for the value of (though I still do enjoy and make time for WFH).
For those who say that Slack or email or VC are perfect substitutes: there's no substitute for the high-bandwidth, low-latency medium of personal communication. Get good enough at running meetijgs of more than two people and you realize how much of the task of efficiently running a meeting involves reading micro-expressions and pauses to pick up on cues that help you direct the conversation (not to mention having n points of failure in a VC being accessed by n network connections). My team has been remote for a week and I've already noticed good meeting runners have worse meetings and bad meetings runners have even worse meetings.
On top of that, right now people are going to be WFH in a house filled with their kids who are also not going to school, possibly having to make sure they're actually taking the online classes their schools have setup from them.
Right, I'm sort of stacking the deck in favor of the WFH maximalist argument by taking for granted that motivation and focus aren't an issue, even though, for many people (or in many circumstances), they are.
Yes this is totally correct. I work in a distributed research lab and basically what has happened is there are two labs. Slack was supposed to connect across the atlantic but all it did was show off that one part of the lab has way more going on than the other part.
"being a junior engineer that works on isolated bits of work"
Most Junior engineers aren't working remotely. I've been working remotely for a decade with different companies and almost all of the developers on my teams have been mid-level to senior. The junior developers always struggled and had so many roadblocks, it made working remotely difficult.
It's really not that difficult to replace an in-person meeting with Webex voice call and/or screensharing. I go onsite once every 3 months for a couple of hours and it's all that's needed.
Our meetings regularly have 10+ people from different departments.
> It's really not that difficult to replace an in-person meeting with Webex voice call and/or screensharing. I go onsite once every 3 months for a couple of hours and it's all that's needed.
This is very much not my experience. I don't know what field you're in or the structure of your company, so I don't want to hazard a guess as to the difference. But the majority of the time I call a meeting, it's to have a fairly complex, dynamic conversation for which the communication bandwidth of Slack/email/GDoc is too low (otherwise we'd stick with async/chat). This means that few meetings consist of conversations that're fairly predictable. Which means the person running the meeting needs to know when to cut a conversation off or let it continue, what direction to take the conversation, pick up on silent hesitancy or disagreement from any of the ten people in the room, etc etc etc. I can go on and on about the techniques I've seen people use to run extremely effective meetings, as well as how poorly-run meetings don't use them. As mentioned, these rely on visual and timing cues that humans use to communicate, sometimes unconsciously. (I'm keenly aware of good and bad meetings because I hate meetings)
Tone is notoriously hard to communicate in written form. Body language is never conveyed. Intonation is non-existent. At best you get some word choice signaling, but while I think low latency may be over-rated in the "catalogue" above, high-bandwidth is exactly the point vs reading an email/slack/etc.
If you seriously think written text is as communicative as face to face communication, I would consider being evaluated by a professional for a social interaction disorder of some sort.
It’s only noisy if you don’t know what you’re looking at. Watch a professional poker game sometime and you’ll see the lengths people go to avoid non-verbally communicating the strength of their hand. Table talk is completely casual up until someone is involved in a monster hand and suddenly they go catatonic.
Of course there’s still noise. Just like in text. Professional writers struggle just as hard to get their word choice and phrasing -just so-.
His point is that all in-person communication includes elements that cannot be translated over text. This includes things like facial expressions, non-verbal body language. You responded with "learn how to read the manual" which isn't addressing the point that the comment is making.
We're working on an always-on voice chat tool for remote teams addressing your point around text v. voice. Testing a private alpha if you want to try it out- https://www.presence.so
I think you're trying to say that written communication is more efficient, but your responses here just read like "No" without any supporting argument.
Here's some information on terms you're clearly unfamiliar with that I used in the part you quoted. In the future I suggest you try and understand the words you're reading _before_ making a fool of yourself, but you do you. Hope that helps!
Have you never spent a few hours (or even days) on a back and forth over email, only to solve things in two minutes by giving the person a call? Spoken communication is way more efficient for certain things
For certain things, yes. For other things, no. For instance, I find "all hands" meetings at work to be a complete waste of time, except maybe for the possibility of socializing or getting a free lunch. I could learn everything I need to know from these meetings in a few minutes just by reading an email, instead of wasting an hour of my time listening to bosses drone on and on about stuff or show photos of their families and dogs.
Basically, I think the key is latency. If you need to communicate two-way to work out issues, then you want low latency (because each response of yours depends on the other party's last response), so speech is quickest. (There's also texting, but that sucks because the data entry method is so slow; I don't know why so many people prefer it to talking, even for conducting intimate relationships.) However, if the communication is one-way (like your company disseminating some general information for all employees), then at least for me, reading is much, much faster than listening to someone talk.
I WFH all the time. I was able to design the product that our company now sells, write the initial code, hire the team that built it and sometimes manage some of them, all remotely. I dunno, the things I read about WFH imply that shouldn't have been possible but it was.
I find almost all meetings to be a waste of time. Maybe 1:1s are the exception, but they're also pretty much optional - good to have a catch up with team members sometimes but if someone can't make it that day no big deal.
The problem with meetings is that a well run meeting needs to have an agenda and ideally written minutes, I don't think anyone disputes that (except for casual 1:1 catch-ups which don't). So you end up writing anyway, or wish someone had. Without the writing aspect meetings are often poorly disciplined, achieve little, run over and end with an agreement to organise another meeting.
In the end, work - the production of useful artifacts customers will buy - gets done alone. It doesn't get done in meetings with colleagues.
For myself, WFH is hit and miss in terms of productivity. Some days I'm super productive and might even stay logged on for extra hours. Other days, I'm hardly productive at all. My home "office" is a desk in my living room, so there can be a lot of distractions between wife watching TV and pets. I can usually get by listening to music with headphones on. Contrasting with work in the office, there are far more distractions. People walking by, drive bys from the boss, etc. And I dont even work in an open office, just low cube walls that I can see over while seated.
My fear, being a proponent of distributed work, is that high-profile places will half-heartedly try it due to the current circumstances, declare it to be a failure, and take us two steps back.
Well yeah, but most people don't have home offices and never will. My girlfriend and I live in a one bedroom apartment that costs $3,800 per month. We're sure as hell not gonna pay the extra thousands per month to get a three bedroom apartment so we can each have a home office. Having extra rooms in your dwelling dedicated for work is a huge luxury. Having companies provide an office space for you to work in (that they pay for) is quite nice.
There is an interesting idea here for companies to subsidize employees' home offices with all the money they're saving on not renting office buildings of their own, but that would make the housing crisis substantially worse and further increase hatred of tech. Imagine how badly rents would be driven up on apartments typically desired by families if you've got lots of single workers using work subsidies to get larger apartments than they actually needed.
It'd only cause those negative effects if people don't leave the Bay Area, though, with that newfound flexibility. There are plenty of places, even desirable urban centers, that aren't the Bay. (I've worked for SFBA companies and I live in Boston--with its own housing crunch, though not nearly as bad, and TBH I'd live here even if I didn't work in tech, it's just my home.)
I think you underestimate the reasons why people find living in certain cities desirable. There's a lot more to do with it than merely having your job located there. Downtown SF and NYC are always going to be hugely desirable, regardless of whether people are working from home or not.
See, usually it's me saying that (because I'm usually replying to the people upholding rural living as some kind of ideal) but the thing is, people are moving to these cities, from other urban areas, mmmmostly for work. Not because they're great. They are great! But the gravity is because of the jobs more than anything else. Without that gravity, I tend to think people won't keep moving there in the same numbers and more of them will leave.
If you can get 70-80% of the desirability for 50% of the cost (Boston would be like 80-90% and 60-70%, by my reckoning) while retaining 90% of the salary, and you make it perfectly acceptable on all sides to do so, a lot of people are gonna do that.
I think you overestimate how many people want to be there when career isn’t the driver. Everyone I know who moved to the bay did it for the job and gave zero fucks about the shit lined streets of the city.
If it wasn’t for the abundance of tech jobs, there is exactly 0% chance I would choose to live in the Bay Area. To me (everyone is different), the jobs are the upside, the rest is downside.
If I could simply decide to live anywhere, and have some guarantee that my job opportunities and salary would remain the same as if I were in the Bay Area? So many choices!
If I limited myself to the US, any state with zero state income tax, cheap land/housing, and mild winters would work. I lived in Florida for over a decade and would go back in a heartbeat if the job situation matched the Bay Area. A big suburban house near Las Vegas would be fine. Texas doesn’t seem bad either—lots of land!
Without data there's no way to tell, so some folks will shout out about the inscrutable appeal of the popular cities today while others deify the beauty of nature with country living.
Given that SF was not particularly appealing to live in 10 years ago, I think the story is more complicated.
Yes, don't mean to minimise the challenge of having a home office that befits the name. While I am fortunate enough to have the space, my company does provide a stipend for people without it to e.g. rent a desk at a co-working space.
My concern remains that companies who are doing this on the fly, due to an external influence, with employees who never signed up to be remote-first, with new, unfamiliar tools, and without the ingrained culture that a distributed-from-the-start company enjoys, will nonetheless tar us with the same brush when their experience turns out to be disappointing.
I didnt take it as belittling. Its the one spot that's mine, with my desk, computer and filing cabinet. I live in a 3 bedroom townhouse. Have 3 kids plus the wife. Wife uses one of the bedrooms as her office (she runs a non-profit and needs more room than my occasional wfh) and the lids share the other non-master bedroom.
I'm sorry to hear the GP has to pay 3800 for a studio. I pay around 4400 for a 3 bed/3.5 bath townhouse w/ a 2 car garage in Chicago's suburbs; and I think what I pay is ridiculous.
Yeah, I wish I had those prices. I'm in Manhattan though. At least my transportation costs are very low (about $30 per month); add on the total costs of your cars and that $4,400 figure grows substantially :(
I'd rather just work in a normal office provided by my employer than work in a co-working space. The latter seems strictly worse, so long as your company has an office where you live anyway (and mine does).
Also, co-working spaces are no-go because of COVID-19 too, at least for now. So the current situation isn't so much WFH as it is WFQ, and co-working spaces don't meet that need either.
Having extra rooms in your dwelling dedicated for work is a huge luxury. Having companies provide an office space for you to work in (that they pay for) is quite nice
You’re assuming everyone works on the west coast....
The average square footage of a home in the US is 2600 square feet. (https://money.cnn.com/2014/06/04/real_estate/american-home-s...) I would assume since most developers in most of the United States make more than the average for their market, they would be able to afford the average home. In my market (a major metropolitan city), any developer with 5-7 years of experience could easily afford a place with an extra room for an office.
We were renting a three bedroom, 2 bath apartment with an office four years ago in the most exclusive part of the city with the best school system for $1700/month. It’s still about the same price. We bought a brand new build 3200 square foot house (5 bedroom/3.5 bath house with a large separate office) and are paying $2150/month all in with 5% down and still live in a great school system.
> most people don't have home offices and never will.
[citation needed]
Just because your use case, and likely that of most of your friends, doesn't lend itself to having a home office, doesn't mean that other people, with different costs of living (esp in land price), will live the same way. If $3,800 got you 5 bedrooms instead of 1 and everything else stayed the same, it's possible you'd voluntarily choose to downsize, but it also seems possible you'd keep it, and have 1 bedroom, a home office each, a conference room, and a (shared) workshop. Or however else you wish you divide up the space. (Hint: children take up a lot of it.)
I work from home and choose to live in the inside the ring in Berlin because it's got everything I want from the place I live. What's outside my frontdoor is way more important than how big my apartment is.
In fact, if you don't have to commute during rush hour, living in remote suburbs is the best of both worlds: you're far enough that the prices are low/rent is cheap, but the city is close enough to casually drive there off peak. Sure, if you had to endure 1 hour commutes one way every day, that would be terrible, but since you don't drive at the same time as everyone else, you won't have to experience that.
Assuming someone can or wants to drive, and owns a car, is a massive assumption in today's world.
Many people who live in urban areas neither own a car nor want to drive.
Also, suburbs are boring as hell. There's literally nothing to do outside except stare at parked cars and locked houses. Taking a walk for more than an hour is impossible because there is nowhere to go to the bathroom, unless you want to do your business in someone's bush. There are no drinking fountains, and if you get hungry on your long walk, you're screwed. It can get (seriously) depressing, compared to cities, where most of the stuff you pass by on the street is generally open to walk into and explore, and food/water/restrooms are readily available.
> Many people who live in urban areas neither own a car nor want to drive.
By "many", I understand you mean "few". I live in Seattle, which has one of the better transit networks in the country, certainly better than average. Yet, 85% of households own cars. In the suburbs, that percentage is even higher.
> Also, suburbs are boring as hell. There's literally nothing to do outside except stare at parked cars and locked houses.
That hasn't been my experience. There's lots of things to do in suburbs, you just need to drive there. The rest of your comment is about some difficulties of doing walks in suburbs, which are quite foreign to me -- for one thing, I'm quite sure that almost everywhere in Seattle metro area, you're not more than 1 hour walk from a convenience store. Given how millions of people love going hiking in places even further from convenience stores, gas stations and water fountains, I don't see this as such a huge problem. The rest of your complaints are simply matter of your preferences: I for one thing couldn't care less about presence of places to walk into and explore. I'm not a tourist in my own town, I need to get places and get things done, and idly walking around the business districts is not one of my hobbies.
> By "many", I understand you mean "few". I live in Seattle, which has one of the better transit networks in the country, certainly better than average. Yet, 85% of households own cars. In the suburbs, that percentage is even higher.
This may be a US thing. I've lived in about 10 countries now (but not the US), and I hardly knew anyone who owned a car in any of them.
I googled it up and 209M adults vs 183M passenger vehicles.
In the USA registration wildly varies by state and the actual stat is a quarter billion "vehicles" but in my state every non-rowboat boat is a registered vehicle (although essentially unenforced for small sailboats and inflatables) and every boat trailer is yet another vehicle and every RV is a registered license plated vehicle and every trailer and etc. My parents never owned more than one car although they had five "registered vehicles" at one point. Also any commercial vehicle that drives on public roads, in my state this includes SOME farm tractors and other farm equipment. Needless to say every motorcycle and moped is a registered vehicle, and in my municipality, resident bicycles are technically required to be registered although never enforced.
Nationwide there's about 70M "things that move and pay registration tax and are not cars" that are registered as vehicles. Very near one per adult.
As a check on the figures, note there's only 105M "housing units" in the USA, so when you see strange figures reported about 300M to 400M vehicles its obvious that the average house does not have four cars parked in front of it, and that figure includes scrapped cars in junkyards and railroad cars and minecarts and things like that.
Are you European by chance? We have these things but they tend to be very spread out due to our wealth of land, especially so as you move further west. Further a lot of them have basically slowly turned into boring suburban sprawl.
Active urban space, sleepy suburbs, and country-living are pretty much your options in most of the US.
Have you ever been to somewhere like Half Moon Bay, near San Francisco? That's a town isn't it? I know it's a 'city' (everything seems to be a 'city' in the US) but it's town-sized. You could walk to everything there. It seems to have a bustling main street. I see lots of these little towns in the US. Carmel? Morro Bay? These are just the ones I can remember being in myself and thinking these are perfect little walkable towns.
Outside of a very small number of admittedly very large coastal cities, the action is in the burbs, not the city.
Metro areas that are under, perhaps, 10M people, generally have nothing to do in the legacy cities. Everything fun has been built in the burbs for half a century. NYC is fun to visit, but only 8M people live there compared to 319M not living there. 98% of the population will never participate in "new urbanism" and so forth.
You're flat-out describing an alternate reality than the one that actually exists. Go down the list of largest American cities and tell me the first one you can find that you think has more fun things to do in the suburbs than in the city proper. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
Well, yeah, I think we're aggressively agreeing with each other that life is quite a bit different for 5% of the population in megacities vs 95% of the population outside those cities.
Take for example the location of the 2020 democratic national convention, Milwaukee. I know for a fact there's literally nothing to do in the city other than drive to the burbs.
Generally fun follows the people who pay for it, and anywhere there's no geographic constraint or travel time constraint, people always do the burb thing, and the fun follows them. I visit family in that area, and there's just nothing to do in the city, all the action is in the burbs.
You can have a burb 20 minute drive from Milwaukee so all the fun moves to the burbs to follow the money. You can't have a burb 20 minute drive from downtown NYC, so without the people moving to the burbs there's no fun in the burbs.
You don't both need a private office, there is no reason you can't have one office room with 2 desks. Companies should probably pay extra with the savings from not having to rent an office. Combined with the savings from not having to transport yourself to an office, it should be affordable.
> Combined with the savings from not having to transport yourself to an office, it should be affordable.
Until it isn't. That's the magic of the invisible hand at work. And when you can barely afford rent on a WFH-friendly apartment with work subsidies, think of all the regular families with non-tech salaries that can no longer dream of it.
The benefit of WFH is your actual location doesn't matter too much. If the inner city apartment is too expensive then find one further out. Anyone with a full time job should be able to find something with 2 bedrooms somewhere in the country/state of their job.
> You don't both need a private office, there is no reason you can't have one office room with 2 desks.
My girlfriend and I both have a good number of meetings, which is incompatible with being in the same room as another person also yapping to their computer. When we both have meetings we need to be in a different room.
> Combined with the savings from not having to transport yourself to an office, it should be affordable.
I pay roughly $30 per month in total transportation costs, so this is negligible. My $3,800 rent at least gets me an apartment within walking distance (and easy biking distance) of work.
I'm a middle manager of a moderately sized team. 7hr meeting days are the exception (maybe 1 such day every two months). Usually its 3hrs-4hrs per day or so.
$3800/month? if you can work remotely, you could go to a place like Medellin and get a penthouse suite with 5 bedrooms, a 360 view of the city AND cleaning staff and personal chef for less than that!!
And still have money left over. If you work in tech there is a strong developer community and you can get away with not speaking the language as 5-bedroom penthouse suites are located in neighborhoods where almost everyone is bilingual, from waiters to C-level execs.
There are plenty of English speakers in poblado. The women are beautiful. The meat and produce is super fresh and the people are super friendly. I was there for 6 months and absolutely loved it. it was way better than living in SF. If I wasn't working on my startup in Europe, I'd go back there in a heartbeat.
I've got the same: 1 bedroom flat, however if I were to work 100% remote, what I spend on commuting each month would almost cover higher rent for 2 bedroom flat.
I think it can be much more productive if done properly. The problem is most likely of our established companies are only equipped- culturally- to do things the old way.
I’ve never grown more or learned more from other people than in the last 13 months at a remote startup. Even if it all folds over tomorrow I’m better off because of the opportunity. I say all of this as someone who is vocal about the challenges of remote work here and among my friends and colleagues.
Agree - I don't buy the automatic WFH productivity boost. Going to a coffee shop to work defeats the purpose of not working from the office and at my place, I don't have a dedicated office space. Add a kid, spouse, dog and a cat who it turns out has quite an interest in what it is I do and I've gotten almost nothing done in the last few days. My bathrooms are clean and yard space is finally cleaned though.
This is not about WFH vs lunch conversations but about working in a quiet environment with minimal disruptions vs in a noisy open office with tonnes of disruptions. Good measures for you:
WFH can be good for productivity, but it takes careful planning, good processes, and practice. I agree that it's extremely doubtful to increase productivity when done in an emergency fashion. (However it's obviously better than keeping everyone in the office to spread the virus.)
Yeah? Name a product to come out of FB or Google in the past 5 years that has been a major financial success - and acquisitions (like IG, Oculus) don't count. Name anything that has fundamentally changed about those companies in that time.
That's a weird bar to set. Why does productivity depend on net new products? Why can't companies with cash cows spend effort on figuring out how to grow that cash cow and boost their revenue that way instead?
Is it? I can name other companies that have released successful new products.
If you're just aqui-hiring or buying successful products what does that say about your internal culture? Are you super focused on only your primary product, or are the people you've hired kind of not "new product" innovative?
I guess a lot of people think Google/FB == innovation, and they are without a doubt highly innovative, but when it comes to products I'm not really sure that they are. I think most of their innovation comes from improving what they currently do, not really expanding into new markets or with new products.
1) Innovation doesn't have to be in creating new products, and can very well be in incremental improvements to existing products.
2) "new products" also doesn't need to be externally visible. There could be lots of innovation but just for things that aren't visible to customers.
Netflix hasn't come out with a new product since streaming started. But there are definitely a lot of new things that are built that are at least arguably innovative.
What does it matter when advertising revenue has more than doubled in that short time period? If you're good at one insanely profitable thing and you're making money out the wazoo with it, who cares?
It does also say: "Google worked with a subset of its new HTC hires on a contract basis for the Pixel and Pixel 2".
This suggests they at least partially outsourced the work initially and then acqui-hired their way into in-housing it.
Though, yes, it is possible that some of it was done in-house from the beginning. Just because they leaned on external resources to some extent doesn't mean they developed no internal capability on their own.
You're welcome to go back further, but it's mostly commentary on the current state of those companies. Google / FB / others have become significantly less innovative as time has proceeded. They are almost entirely driven by their core product (with little changes, despite comments suggesting incremental innovation - not enough to justify thousands of devs) and acquisitions. Others, like Apple and Microsoft, seem to be more willing to innovate internally.
I'd argue the opposite. Being chatty and co-located means you are way more likely to interrupt your colleague in a period of high-productivity flow (or vice versa). Working remotely allows people to easily carve 4 hour period of focus (notwithstanding excessive meetings).
Even if assume for a moment that WFH improves productivity, this impromptu WFH means that most people might not even have a proper desk/etc for optimal WFH setup.
Anecdote, at one of the affected companies and we’ve been wfh. I honestly think my productivity has tanked. That’s the general sentiment for other folks that I’ve talked to, too
My company's moving towards WFH and my productivity is suffering, even though I've worked remotely for years with no problem.
Many employees are new to remote work, and are now distracted by the virus, changes in the workplace, etc. This leads to bottlenecks for anyone relying on upstream work, and there's a chain reaction. I'm waiting a lot longer for work correspondence and code reviews.
It's reasonable to be distracted right now -- doesn't seem too bad yet, but it's impossible to work at capacity with these factors.
I just think you notice how unproductive you are more when working alone. If you were in the office, you could go get a coffee or spend an hour or two bullshitting with someone near a watercooler, or have a longer lunch, or sit in some pointless meeting. I've been working from home for the last year and a half, and as a consultant I only charge for the time when I'm working, and let me tell you, to work for 8 hours a day _for real_ is a pretty difficult thing. It's something people never actually do on a consistent basis as FTEs. In any given day in the office _at most_ half a day, if not less, is spent doing something productive.
And that's in a hard-charging company like Google. Other companies are worse: ~13 years ago I worked at Microsoft and we had a period where the team just didn't do any work at all, for like 2 months. Everyone still showed up and pretended to be busy AF, but nothing got done. Lots of meetings and watercooler conversations got done though. Lots of status reporting as well. By any traditional metric people appeared to be "productive". But nothing got done all the same.
I'm watching TV as we speak when I should be working. Pretty sure I will do 0 hours today. It has nothing to do with "noticing" anything. I simply can't work from home while I'm very productive in the office.
Yeah, discipline might be an issue; remote work is great for those that have stronger will, not so great for those that switch to "home" mode. You need to have internal motivation to work.
Yeah, I am still in high school, so I do not have a job yet, but I did home school for a time, and I really don't have the ability to work anywhere near maximum capacity when I'm at home for a good week or two until I can get into the groove of actually working at home. after that though I feel more comfortable both with work and just in general and I get more productive.
You can. Just turn off TV and start working. Require of yourself that at the end of each week you write a report of what you've done ("snippets" if you work at Google) and send it to your boss. I also track the time (per client), and so could you. It does require some discipline, but it's doable.
If you're so disinterested in your work, you'll find a million ways to goof off in the office also. Just because you're there doesn't mean you'll be productive.
I don't have the will power or motivation. I can't just lie down in the sofa and watch TV at the office. Everyone sees my screen and that's what makes me work. Again, this is a forced WFH.
What's interesting is it's the fear of this that makes companies reluctant to let people WFH. I've noticed whenever I talk to people about it they say things like, but why would anyone work if their manager can't see their screen? It seems like the world is full of people who don't believe their managers are actually monitoring their real output, just hours at desk.
I've been WFH/cafés for the last six years. I have occasional off days but I'm way more productive at home over the long run, than at the office. At the office I often find that I seem to have had a full day but can't actually identify concrete outcomes. It was just a long series of meetings, chitchats, catch-ups, interruptions, and so on.
For anyone who is working remotely or managing a remote team for the first time: find a friend or ex-coworker who has done it and thrived. Ask them to be your sounding board - ideally daily given the situation.
Whether it's amazing or terrible depends on execution (and obviously other things), and transitioning in a week makes it even harder. Lean on someone experienced.
Im in the same boat as OP and this advice just seems totally alien to me. i don’t optimize my productivity like this, I’m just a guy that understands how computers work. I think there are a lot of people like me
My comment wasn’t about optimizing productivity, just being fairly productive and happy. If you’re unhappy or unproductive working remotely, someone who has thrived can suggest some changes — there’s a a good chance they experienced or witnessed the same thing.
My productivity has gone down as well. Because (a) I didn't have a coffee machine at home, and ended up either having to take a mile-long walk to Starbucks or fight against my morning drowsiness; (b) I now need to cook, do the dishes, etc, which are previously handled by the office cafeteria; (c) I tried to reduce my screen time by not having external monitors at home, and now I code on a small 13-inch laptop display.
Because you lack a coffee machine you "have to" travel a mile for a starbucks? You've got to be kidding me. That's a preference, not a problem. Making very decent coffee requires exactly four things: 1. a small pot or kettle of nearly any kind 2. water 3. ground coffee (it can be bought ground and prepackaged by the way) 4. a source of high heat, usually found along the surface of a stove, I assume you have one of these. No offense man, but what an absurd thing to describe as a problem.
People have been making coffee like this for centuries and continue to do so without a problem. It's a no-cost fixable situation you're in.
The crazy bit is that there's a life outside of work, at least in most of the developed world, and yet the comment you replied to highlights a different reality.
A symbiosis, if only temporary between the corporation and the employee.
I think his point is that he hasn't needed a satisfactory coffee setup at home before and thus hasn't done it. If WFH is temporary, then the issues he's facing make sense.
I always work from home and I can see where his issues come from. I'm sure he'd do things differently if this were a permanent state for him.
Or perhaps the walk to starbucks will help him get in shape.
Or perhaps he will finally be able to break the habit. Without coffee many (not all) are sleeping better and more rested. He may discover he is one of those people.
Switch coffee with donut. Or newspaper and it starts sounding like traveling an extra hour in doesn't make as much sense as biking/roller blading/walking or driving 5 minutes to grab that coffee.
Whether it needed to happen is one question. Whether it actually happened is another question, and the answer is yes.
Productivity is ultimately going to be determined by how people actually behave, not how we believe they should behave. Not even by how they believe they should behave.
I sincerely am not trolling, or being snarky in saying this, but that has to be the most privelaged, 1st world problem, entitled statement I've ever read.
If this is the most privileged comment that you've read on the internet, I don't think you've read much. I'm not even sure that the OP was complaining about it.
But in fairness for calling him out you have the most entitled statement ever read (until this message where I feel so entitled I call you out for calling him out)
Thanks for the heads up. I honestly don't see why people see a need to mock me, when I'm pointing out the fact that at my home I don't have the amenities that I enjoy at the office. I'm not even complaining about anything. If someone else had posted a similar comment, I certainly wouldn't have mocked them.
But then again, it is sad that these days, mockery is the default way of discourse on the internet.
For what it's worth, the mockery seems weird and dumb to me. It's pretty clear that you were just engaging in a discussion about whether working from home increased or decreased productivity. But everyone seems to be finding a 'woe is me' tone somewhere between the lines. I wonder if it's mostly a bandwagon effect or if people would tend to read it that way independently.
On the bright side, maybe it will do some good overall, because working from home is (IMO) clearly a good idea at the moment, and now people have a strawman villain they can fight against by supporting WFH policies.
> I honestly don't see why people see a need to mock me, when I'm pointing out the fact that at my home I don't have the amenities that I enjoy at the office.
You're being mocked because you're musing over the lack of luxury office amenities that many, many workers in the U.S. don't have.
And the fact your comment about needing to walk to Starbucks and actually do the dishes make you sound like a manchild.
Honestly, the bit about cooking and doing the dishes sounded even more ridiculous than the coffee thing. What kind of adult can't do even the most basic cooking, or never has to do dishes? How many people actually get all their food at the company cafeteria like this person claims to?
In college I used to work tech support for $8/hour and we had free coffee. My mom used to work at a factory, and the factory-line workers would eat lunch at a subsidized cafeteria provided by the company.
People just hate tech workers and are looking for every reason to represent them as being entitled and out of touch.
Its an issue because things like coffee are in no way necessary for being productive, and certainly not to the extent that you should need to walk a mile to get a coffee before working.
But for me the problem is less anything you are doing, and more the implications of what you've said about Google (and other companies for that matter). The fact that employers are trying to remove so much of the "friction" of normal, human life to maximize time spent working is a bit dystopic. I mean, by the same logic, why not scrap the cafeteria and bathrooms for that matter, hook employees up to feeding tubes and catheters, so they literally never leave their desks?
Cooking, eating, meal cleanup, etc are a part of human life. If we are trying to streamline that, it should be for the extra comfort of the individual, not so that a company can keep them at the grindstone for even longer. So the argument that working from home causes decreases in productivity because employees have to care for themselves isn't actually an indictment against working from home, it's an indictment against the expectations of productivity that employers have.
Seriously, though, I hear you both for what you were actually doing (not really whining) and for how you are taking it. I personally have never been able to just let things roll off me,either (or, better yet, turn them into humor).
I'm not even a Googler and have 3 monitors at home. And I'm pretty sure if you request it they probably find a way of paying for one or give you one for home.
I don't have a coffee machine (we have pour over) but I will by tonight. Also as of today doubling our recipes to make leftovers for lunches, and we have sandwich fixins for lunch as well. I'm expecting this to last for a good little while so it's important to figure out ways to be efficient. The biggest hit to productivity is when the nanny brings the kids home in the afternoon, but it's manageable. I'll continue to perform.
This is just part of being an adult. You can manage! You can get used to anything.
All of these are easily solvable by simply getting the equipment you need to function. A coffeemaker is about $20. Making lunch and cleaning up shouldn't take more than a few minutes unless you genuinely need some elaborate meal. Geez. I mean, I understand if you aren't prepared for it, but if it is going to last for a while, just do what you need to do.
And is your work actually closer than Starbucks? I don't understand that one.
> Making lunch and cleaning up shouldn't take more than a few minutes
Let's hear your cooking tips, then. Preferrably no "microwave the plastic box contents you got from the grocery store", that doesn't count as real food, for nutrients quality nor taste.
Bread takes about 10 minutes, leave it to rest, then bake it. And several loaves can be done at the same time. If you have a bread maker then that's even less work. Pasta just takes a boiling pan. Rice, a pan or a rice cooker. Starches largely cook themselves.
Vegetables/fruit take a minute or two to chop and pan-fry / prep as you like.
Protein can be as simple as a poached chicken breast, roasts again just stick them in an oven. Beans in a pressure cooker, that's also pretty automatic too.
Cooking's as time-consuming as you make it.
And then these can be batched-up / prepped as a morning chore; I find it takes less time than cleaning the house. I don't batch as I like the break in the day of another activity. It's less time than a commute.
YouTube is packed full of easy, tasty recipes if looking for somewhere to start.
I've been using the newbie friendly NYT no knead bread[1] for years, and it's that easy. The only gotcha is that you have to prepare it the night before, but that isn't really a big deal in practice. Bread is surprisingly difficult to ruin, and fresh daily bread has been a huge boon for me in these new WFH times.
Making a sandwich takes about 5 minutes. So does a salad. Or just make 2x the servings of whatever you were going to make for dinner and save half for lunch the next day. Or meal prep and make a weeks worth of lunches in about an hour on Sunday. All of those can be at least as healthy as whatever the cafeteria is making, and take a minimal amount of time.
had to spend a few months back in the states to take care of my cat. The instant pit is a godsend! throw in some frozen veggies and a whole chicken -> enough chicken soup to feed two people for 2 days. Beans + 1-2 ham bones -> a 5 days worth of beans for less than $8.
> I tried to reduce my screen time by not having external monitors at home, and now I code on a small 13-inch laptop display.
Unblock yourself maybe? Pitch to your management that your productivity is bad and get them to either: a) let you bring hardware home, or b) expense your monitors for WFH.
Folgers crystals can address your caffeine addiction. They taste like shit, but you'll live and it'll address the chemical needs, speaking from experience. Alternatively, you can buy and freeze pounds of ground coffee and use a filter and hot water for a similar (but vastly better tasting) effect.
So sorry about the dishes, but perhaps your dish washing efficiency will improve? If it's directly impactful to your productivity now for a single individual's daily calories it suggests you've got a lot to learn here! Perhaps a G2G course once normal business returns?
In terms of the monitor I can't help you, my most productive years were on an 11" MacBook air with a single tmux session. A 13" laptop sounds heavy.
Google is in fact allowing its employees to take their desktop monitors home, which I first discovered when I saw someone walking out through the lobby with one on Monday and thought it was hilarious, only for that to be repeated.
It's funnier because this is the NYC office and no one drives, so he was probably lugging it all the way through the subway system.
But what's the point in buying one if I only need it for a few weeks? I don't want to generate extra trash and those in the office are currently unused.
If you don't already have a monitor at home it's because you don't want one. So it doesn't make sense to spend $500 for something you'll use in a temporary WFH situation, then lose money getting rid of it once WFH starts. Much better to just bring the work monitor home for the duration of WFH.
Incidentally I do already have a monitor at home, that costs more than $500. And I'm not using it for WFH, because I find my 15" work laptop sufficient.
(a) There are any number of brew-at-home solutions, I really like my aeropress as it's simple to use and easy to clean. I grind my own coffee, but you can pick up a bag of beans at Starbucks and they'll grind it any way you like. Or if you don't want the trouble of brewing your own, there are some decent (but not great) instant coffees. I really like the Starbucks Via coffees but they are relatively expensive. Mt Hagen is supposed to be good for an instant coffee.
(b) If you're really unable or unwilling to cook or do the dishes, food delivery services are still running and the restaurants they deliver from will be happy to have your order. Order hot food and re-heat it on arrival if you're worried about getting infected from your food. Or maybe look at once of the box-meal delivery services, you still need to cook, but most of the prep work is done.
(c) buy a cheap monitor for now and sell or donate it after you go back to work. You can get a refurb 22" monitor for $50 or so which must be better than a 13" laptop display.
So buy a coffee machine! A quality one, if you care about your coffee that much. We bought one (my wife loves her morning latte) and it turned out to be the best QoL expense in the last few years. And it isn't even all that expensive!
Id suggest giving up coffee. I mostly have. Maybe once a month I'll have a mug. Used to drink 3 pots a day. Caffeine lost its affect on me. Stupidly, I turned to chewing tobacco for the nicotine to keep me awake when pulling long hours. Like I said: stupid. Should have cut out all addictive stimulants. Working on quitting, but its a process.
Starbucks does not sell anything that deserves the name "coffee". Buy coffee filters, ground coffee, and the result is 10x better than the horrible water with a taste resembling asphalt that Starbucks sells as "coffee".
Oh yes, but that's easily solvable by a $2k investment into coffee machine, dishwasher and a monitor or two. I assumed people had comfortable living/working conditions at home.
If your house doesn't already have a dishwasher you might pay $500+ just for the plumbing and electrical work. Unless you get a "portable dishwasher" that you wheel over to your sink and attach it to the faucet every time you want to do dishes, but if you're going to go through all of that trouble, you may as well just do the dishes yourself.
Depends on the monitors and dishwasher. A $250 dishwasher is a pretty crappy one; the nice ones are $500-1000. $150 will get you a perfectly decent 1080p 23" monitor, however at work I have three 27" monitors that probably cost about $800 each.
It just depends on if you want nice stuff or really basic stuff. The nice stuff costs a lot more than the prices you quoted, just like a nice midrange car like a Camry costs a lot more than a basic, bottom-of-the-line car (Yaris?).
Considering the audience of this site, I would assume most here would buy higher-end stuff, and not the cheapest things available.
Well, if you invest 10-20x that much in your coffee machine, you get something that's much less of a maintenance hassle and makes significantly better coffee. Worth it if you drink coffee every day.
Honestly, it's all about the beans. I've had fantastic coffee from a $20 french press and horrible coffee from a $5k machine. Don't splurge on the machine, splurge on the coffee.
Admittedly, I'm not a coffee drinker, but rather a tea drinker, but I've seen French presses and I thought the idea was that they aren't very expensive, but they're a lot more laborious than a machine, both in preparation and in cleaning.
It's kinda like my fancy tea infuser cup: I have a nice glass mug with a laser-cut stainless-steel infuser for loose tea. It was $30 at a fancy store (could probably get it cheaper on Amazon), but it's a one-time purchase. With high-end loose tea, it makes great tea, but the problem is cleaning: cleaning out the infuser (by hand) is a lot more work than just dumping a tea bag in the trash and putting a regular mug in the dishwasher. But the results certainly are a lot better than a $0.20 tea bag.
They're not that bad. I rinse them out after use and then put them in the dishwasher. Preparation is like making a cup of tea, just pouring some hot water in. I would say prep takes <2min for a pot of coffee (including filling up the kettle), cleaning <1 min.
The problem with the infuser is that there's only one of them, unlike regular mugs where I have a whole bunch of them because they're practically free (they're a common gift item, after all). The infuser set-up is expensive, so I'm not going to buy 5 of them so I make tea frequently with no cleaning, so I need to hand-wash it. Regular mugs aren't like this: I can just use them and toss them in the dishwasher and get another one when I want another hot drink. And you're right, it's not a huge amount of time to hand-wash, maybe about a minute or so, but it's still a lot more than the utterly trivial amount of time it takes to put a mug in a dishwasher.
Stove top espresso and simple milk frother that I own 1) makes better coffee than I've ever had in Starbuck because I buy good beans and 2) costs $30. Admittedly I spent $200 on a grinder so I could fresh grind finely as it makes a significant difference to the coffee IMO however I could just as easily get my beans ground when I buy them for free.
Let's say you want to have two higher end monitors, those would get you to around $1k each. Coffee machine/dishwasher are cheap. You might also want to invest into some cooking machine or some kitchen equipment that could allow you to prepare healthy meals quickly.
My motorized standing desk, VESA amounting arm, and 27” FreeSync + color-calibrated monitor _combined_ total at around $1000 dollars.
To highlight the absurdity of this estimate: $2000 USD should be enough to pay for an entire work-from-home setup with a high quality office chair, an ergonomic keyboard, and a whiteboard in addition to what I have mentioned above (assuming that work provides your computer).
Imagine you are used to 4k quantum dot HDR10 displays from FAANG. Would you be happy with some gaming monitor instead? A decent 5k2k monitor is $1100, 5k2.8k is $1300. 4k DCI EIZO is 4k+. You might want two of those as well.
The monitor I have is a Samsung C27HG70, which _is_ a quantum for LED monitor.
Although it’s not 4K, given the fact that it ships with a color calibration report I think calling it “some gaming monitor” is a bit silly.
As someone who’s a bit of a picture quality fanatic (I preferred color accurate panel displays “before it was cool”, my television is a 4K HDR10 OLED, etc.) I think it’s quite ridiculous that you’d classify your suggestions as anything other than luxuriously decadent for most programming work.
I don't work at a FAANG company, but we do have some pretty nice hardware. I have 27" Dell monitors that I think cost about $800 each when new. (They're probably less now, they're a few years out-of-date by now.)
Google's standard issue monitors are standard density. FAANG employees aren't used to fancy monitors, and can certainly get by without them.
Edited to remove a claim that I haven't seen 4k monitors, since I just realized the big displays we can get must be 4k. We can only have one of those though and they're not as fancy as you're claiming.
Fair enough. I suppose the fact that this outbreak happened suddenly contributed to my loss of productivity. If I had time to properly prepare a home office and gradually transition to WFH, I could be more productive than today.
I truly don't intend this to be snarky or rude, but the things you described are part of most homes, not home offices. You've been using your office as your home and your home as a place to sleep.
Correct. And this is, in no small part, due to the fact that there are many amenities in the office that I didn't see a need to buy at home. As a renter I've moved quite a lot of times and will probably move some more, so I've chosen to minimize my possessions at home.
As a temporary solution, if you don't want to/can't make your own, you might be able to get coffee delivered. I do that a lot with Postmates etc. Generally works best with iced drinks, but some places make drinks hot enough to stay hot upon delivery, if the distance isn't too long.
You could also make or buy cold brew coffee (Amazon Fresh delivers large Chameleon cold brew containers to many areas). It stays fresh pretty long if you keep it refrigerated.
Why would you go to all this trouble when you can just buy a cheap coffee maker (I use a Kalita Wave) and come out ahead in savings within a week? Coffee requires exactly two ingredients to make, one of which comes out of your tap. It's absurd to have it delivered by drone every day rather than just making it yourself. Is this the kind of thing that only sounds remotely reasonable to someone in the Bay Area?
Sometimes I just want a kick, and sometimes I want to really appreciate the flavor or get some sort of specialty drink. Most coffee I've had from coffee machines doesn't taste great, even with good beans, and if you want good espresso you need to spend a lot of money and effort... or you can get it from a place that does it for you.
But, yes, if you're looking purely for the caffeine and nothing else, a cheap coffee machine is the way to go.
I was significantly more productive in that huge open office than at home, even when the rest of my team was in a different office. Open offices are significantly flawed, but productively working at home is tough for a lot of people.
All depends how you measure productivity as well. I write more code when I work from home, but lines of code don't necessarily correlate with "useful productivity", since it's entirely possible to work on an epic project that solves no useful problems, or the project fails for other reasons.
A company with an open and communicative culture can be more productive remotely than located in prem. I also believe an on prem company that has a communicative and open culture can be more productive than a remote company.
However, you can’t deny the benefits of going remote if the above is a wash depending on the company.
I actually think it could backfire. Remote work that is thoughtfully implemented can definitely be a productivity boost, but thrown together last minute stuff like this is going to make people more wary of remote, not less.
In addition to that, people are distracted by the virus concerns, and so may be working at lower than 100% capacity regardless if it's from office or home.
The other thing is that people might just treat this period of WFH as a temporary distraction (caused by external forces out of your control), which justifies lower productivity and a bit more goofing around than usual. Kinda like various company internal events, fire drills, or those weird days when things just aren't normal and internet is dead / you have blackouts / office renovation / maintenance that takes a lot of stuff you need for work offline...
It's a different thing when you go into it with the attitude that 1) it is permanent 2) you're expected to be productive as any other full time employee on normal days, onsite or not 3) you'll be fired if you goof off too much.
Oh yes? A productivity bonanza you think? I'm in the Seattle area and my office has been shut down for at over a week now. It's not been as rosy as you think. Here's what it's actually like:
First, the company has always been extremely supportive. Many employees have been working from home exclusively for years and nearly all of us WFH from time to time at least. The processes and expectations are well established. Engineers have always been supplied with a laptop in addition to their workstation, so WFH has always been immediately possible for everyone. You get your pick of hardware, but all the systems and services and processes have been optimized to make it reasonable (not just possible) to get serious engineering work done with nothing but a Chromebook. I've seen many programmers working _at the office_ from a Chromebook because they liked the interface. But for most of us... it's not optimal.
Corp work has to be done on Corp-owned hardware. This is enforced by technical controls that can't readily be circumvented, so even if you have a great computer at home, you'll be working from your laptop. Many of us at the kitchen table. Unless, of course, you've gotten a corp-issued rig in your house... which can't have happened in the past couple of months because the computer hardware supply chain in China has been shut down for a long time. Think you'll just go buy a nice monitor from Best Buy and dock it with your laptop? You weren't the first to think that; computer monitors are sold out across the city (having 4 giant tech companies all go 100% WFH at the same time will do that).
At a team level, it's been a mess. Productivity is definitely not up. We still get a lot of stuff done and we haven't adjusted any of our forecasts, but coordination has become a whole lot harder. Sure the company has been generally ready for this for a long time, but as individuals we were a bit blind-sided by the suddenness of it. Oh, and the local school district has gone "remote-learning" as well for this month (think WFH, but for 9-year-olds), so local parents are doubling as home-school proctors. It's not a distraction-free environment.
Thing is, we wouldn't have offices if it we didn't work more efficiently there. It's not like working from home is something foreign to us; like I said, we all do it as often as we like. Each of us maybe a couple of days a month, as circumstances require. But sending everyone home at the same time, that hasn't been the utopia it might seem to the casual onlooker.
so even if you have a great computer at home, you'll be working from your laptop. Many of us at the kitchen table. U... Think you'll just go buy a nice monitor from Best Buy and dock it with your laptop?
You have a great computer at home, but it has no monitor and you use it from the kitchen table? I have a "decent" computer at home, and I plug my work laptop into the monitor when I work from home.
You weren't the first to think that; computer monitors are sold out across the city (having 4 giant tech companies all go 100% WFH at the same time will do that).
You'd think that living and working in the Seattle area that you'd have heard of a little online retailer based in Seattle called Amazon. They can deliver a name-brand 27" 1920x1080 monitor to you tomorrow for less than $150. Want a nice 32 inch wide screen 3840x2160 like you ahve at work? That's closer to $350 but you can still have it tomorrow. I see lots of monitors in stock there (as well as on Newegg and bhphotovideo, my other go-to online merchants).
If I didn't already have a good monitor at home and desk to put it on, I'd just buy a cheap $99 27" monitor and set it up on the kitchen table during the day, then if I no longer needed it after the office re-opened, I'd donate it somewhere.
At my company, WFH hasn't been an issue so far -- we have multiple offices and everyone was already used to using Slack and video conference meetings. To be honest, it's even easier to hold a meeting now since no one needs to find a conference room (they are always in short supply). But everyone uses a laptop as their primary computer, if they need something more powerful, they use a cloud VM.
Can I ask what your company does? Is there work that you do that requires having in office, non-laptop hardware? Seems like your company has implemented some policies that make it unsuited for WFH, but I don't see them as common. I don't know many companies where people are working on "rigs". Just about everyone is using a company issued laptop, whether at the office or at home. The only difference between working at home and the office is the desk you are sitting at and perhaps the number of monitors you are using. But even from a monitor perspective, I don't think having an extra monitor or a larger screen is that much different from a productivity perspective. A little better? Sure. World changing? Definitely not.
Frankly, its a little bizarre that you have non-laptop company issued hardware for doing work. No company I've ever worked at, from small tech startups to large, non-tech Fortune 500 companies in industries not known for being cutting edge, would have these issues. But every company I've worked at issued everyone uses laptops, utilized team software (Slack/Teams), and had options for either using ssh into on more powerful onsite servers or cloud computing, for the instances where it is required.
It's clearly Google. You can't develop software at Google on anything other than their own Linux distribution on their own hardware. You can do screen remoting to that hardware though. Also Google uses the term "corp" all the time.
Productivity is only a compelling argument if employees keep working the same hours, which they shouldn't unless they get paid more: producing more without any more salary is just another way of working for free. And while remote work has its upsides, it has its downsides too: loneliness is one that I've experienced myself and heard other colleagues mention.
I cope with loneliness by throwing parties inviting people I don't know but am somehow connected with, either via language studies, art clubs, hobbies etc. I partied with billionaires, professors from Princeton etc. that way.
I worked in/led remote teams for around 8 years. Initial first few weeks are weird, then everybody hops on asynchronous communication (you can use phones/iPads whenever face2face is needed), people can take a walk in a park/forest to get fresh ideas (e.g. problems that took a week to resolve in the office took 2 hours while walking outside and refocusing brain). It's just too few companies are willing to take that "leap of faith". Some of my most memorable experiences were programming for two months in a cottage overlooking Pu`uhonua O Hōnaunau on Hawai`i - that made me superbly productive, happy and driven - I would absolutely recommend/wish everybody to experience the same.
Yes it’s a lot like going for it on 4th and 1. Statistically you have a better chance of getting a first down than not but no coach on the planet will risk it. In my own experience I worked remote for many years and I was incredibly efficient but I also was outside of the office politicking which was good and bad - for me it was probably more good because honestly the less I’m involved in politics the better. Later when I confounded a startup our mgmt team was 100% remote as a consequence of all having prior worked at a large company with many offices. It was productive but we found ourselves having more frequent and longer off sites to compensate and eventually we did coalesce most employees in one of three locations though many still had the option of remote. I enjoyed it a lot because it prevented work life from becoming too routine and we were still productive.
One was a distributed messaging system (imagine geographically partitioned real-time clusters for investment banking and their transacted operations), another was a web app for creatives from a top company utilizing bleeding-edge tech and we created some innovative things competitors lack till this day. I don't think we would if we all were stuffed in some open-plan office somewhere as it required individual creativity and surprising solutions one could figure out in solitude only and only then discuss with the others... Both companies extremely well-known and darlings of developers world-wide (producing tech almost everybody used).
I would hope most tech firms would not notice or would encourage employees to go for a walk from 1-3pm if it helps solve a problem they’ve been working on for weeks!
Speaking from experience, they don't. I know this because I tried to introduce a walking culture into my team as I built it. Problem was whilst I could WFH my manager didn't believe in it, so everyone was hired into an office in the middle of the city. Walking in a busy city center is not quite as effective as doing it in the sort of place people tend to live. Also, he claims he thinks best whilst writing not walking so there's a mismatch of styles. But I guess mostly the issue is people aren't really expected to think too hard, just churn through tickets.
I am not so sure. Some managers just need to feel complete control over their teams. You also can't predict when the inspiration hits, it's not like you get great ideas every time you take a walk in a forest.
Yes, it was AirBnB, minimal stay of 1 month. I managed to visit many places around the world but after ~2 years it got a bit boring (not sure I'd call that a 1st world problem, it's probably even worse than that ;-) This spot on Hawaii was not far from the Volcano, so walking on fresh lava was a funny past time (with a few destroyed shoes). But I had to conceal my whereabouts from my colleagues (i.e. show only white walls behind me while doing face2face) as they tended to react in ugly ways when I told them my first travel destination back then (Japan) and I decided not to risk destroying their morale (CEOs wife at that time reacted especially bad and held grudge for some time).
I don’t know... I pessimistically have doubts that employees “won’t return to the office again” - as some headlines or hot takes have alluded - as a result of WFH.
IMO, it’s a real estate thing more than a productivity thing.
If we’re talking about weeks-months of WFH, then going from Office->WFH->Office seems like the more likely plan. Like how experiencing a blizzard may mean not going to the office for 1-2 weeks, but at some point a return will happen.
Companies that own/rent nice, expensive buildings to contain hundreds/thousands of employees are not going to write it off and stop using them for full-remote all of a sudden. The physiological value of WFH is not as quantifiable to bean count as property asset value.
I've worked in an office for years, and then transitioned to working from home for years. The initial transition was rough: snacking, lack of motivation, lack of structure.
But it only took about a month to get past that. You start building your own routine and structure, optimized to your life, not a mandated 9-5. Not only am I more efficient and less stressed at home, I'm pretty certain I actually "work" more hours than sitting at an office.
And I'm a pretty extroverted person, that thrives with other human contact. When working from home, I get to choose when to socialize/collaborate, it isn't hoisted on me.
Yes, I'm speaking for myself and all other people who simply can't be productive working from home. No idea why that's so hard to believe or why you need to be so borderline about it. Great that it works for some but that doesn't mean it's the right thing for everyone.
There's remote work and there's remote work.. I used to work remotely for a day or two a week but now after one straight week of working from home and not having any social interaction due to the coronavirus thing, I'm climbing up the walls a bit. There is barely any traffic on the street here in the Seattle area, everyone is anxious and I personally find it very hard to focus and be productive.
I'm not sure how you get to that conclusion. Or were you saying that as "they will now learn about the advantages after this experiment"?
I also don't think it's a clean experiment as many other factors are impacting people's productivity anyways, but the results will definitely be interesting to look at.
Cheers to that, I'm "forced" to work from home this week, I seriously hope some benefits for higher management will emerge. I predict so. I hope the will thoroughly evaluate this week.
So the most profitable companies of all time will zillions of intelligent workers have thus far been unable to grasp a simple and easy way to jump their profitability substantially? Hmm ...
No, I'm saying that 'big corporations' universally do not have easy, low-hanging fruit sitting in front of them that would instantly improve productivity.
If 'remote work' were some really expensive investment, then we could see that it would take some to make it's way into big corps.
But it's relatively easy, and trivial to experiment with, and most companies don't do it in most cases.
What worked 10 years ago before their IPOs might not work now. Plenty of talented people won't even consider non-remote work these days and those are often the most driven ones that don't want to be stuck in offices/traffic all day long but have some life as well.
Family is a big one. I live with my parents, and WFH occasionally (when sick for example), and it's very hard to convince them that I am WORKING from home. And no, just because I am on my PC all day doesn't mean I'm playing videogames all day.
Being based in Europe, Germany specifically, it seems like the reaction to this situation is much more intense in the US than in Europe. I haven’t heard of any employers going full WFH or universities closing outside of Italy.
And theories why the reaction in the US is or seems to be more intense?
US public health infrastructure is less resilient than most of europe, capacity is lower and everything is >10x more expensive.
Further the risk of transmission is higher from low wage workers who can neither afford to take time off nor afford health care. Sick days are not a guaranteed (California guarantees only 3) and many employers will fire employees who take even unpaid sick days.
This is all nice post hoc rationalization, and they may well be factors. But the reality is that North American coastal tech companies are far more progressive when it comes to letting employees manage their own health than most others, especially European companies.
In my current Bay Area employment, if I am sick I stay home. If I feel well enough to work I do, otherwise I don't. No questions/justifications asked besides giving my teammates a heads up over text.
When I worked for a French company, being sick meant having to go to the doctor (writing a 23 euro check out of pocket that was reimbursed a month or two later) to get an official sick note to justify my absence from work, otherwise I would get penalized.
I don't disagree with your hypothesis, but also European paternalism is real.
I could be wrong, but the required note from the doctor isn't paternalism, it's (I think) related to how workplace insurances and the healthcare system work in Europe, requiring proof for everything.
With the epidemy, remote consultation with a doctor will be more mainstream, it will be easier to book a quick 20 minutes consultation and get the dematerialized note.
In my opinion, requiring people to consult a professional only has benefit. People get help, employers get proof, doctors get work.
> In my opinion, requiring people to consult a professional only has benefit. People get help, employers get proof, doctors get work.
I think it only has downsides. If people really need help, they can get it even if they're not required to consult. When they don't really need help, they're just wasting everyone's time. Doctors around here (.fi) seem to have more than enough of work as it is, so there's no reason to create additional busywork for them; they've got more important things to attend to. Otherwise we might as well start breaking windows.
I know people who go to work (and school..) sick because getting permission to be sick and stay home is a PITA. Sigh.
As of a few days ago, we in Bavaria are now able to get sick notes from our primary care doctors (Hausärzte) by phone for absences up to 7 days.
My employer, a large manufacturer, usually requires a doctor’s note for illnesses over three days, and I think that’s standard in Germany. Otherwise, think you have a cold? Stay home a day or two and drop the boss an email as soon as you can - no one wants you spreading it around! If I did that more than a few times a year, my boss might start requiring notes, but as long as we don’t seem to be abusing it, they assume we want to do our jobs when we can.
As for COVID-19, they’re being even more explicit: if you’ve recently been to Italy or other heavily-impacted place or have any of the symptoms, you must stay away from all company sites for 14 days, doing WFH if your position allows for it, or getting written off sick if you can’t (people actually running the machines or inspecting parts)
I think it's related to how sick days are paid in Europe. In Poland, I get paid 80% of my salary on sick days, as such, to avoid abuse you need to go to the doctor to get it verified. My understanding is that in the US it's much easier to get a sick leave, but you don't get paid for its duration.
In US, most office employees get a set number of sick days year, get paid in full and all that is need is a text or email. I think I get 12, it's never an issue so I may have accrued more by now.
Exactly. At least in Germany sick days (for the first weeks) are paid for by the health insurance companies, which need a means to know this is a particular case for a payout, hence the need for the note.
weird, in the netherlands I just send a message to my boss saying im sick. He's also not allowed to ask what kind of illness I have, unless it lasts long and then a company doctor (not actually from the company, its just how they call them) has to see me.
I'm not sure how to interpret that table. The range of beds/person is amazing to me. Does that mean that some countries have more demand for beds or that some countries have shorter hospital stays (one bed serves more people per unit time) or that some countries have too few beds with people being turned away. Probably all of the above.
So that table just caused me to ask more questions rather than answering any.
I also don't understand that chart, but perhaps the huge range must mean there are some underlying different assumptions, calculations, or methodologies.
This study looks at ICU/Critical Care beds, and finds also a large range but quite different ranking as above:
This pandemic specifically requires assistance breathing for a huge amount of people. I'm not sure how closely that correlates to hospital beds, but it could be a big issue in the US where many hospital-like things are dealt with by urgent care.
What is the overall infection prognosis for the US? For Germany it is expected that 60 to 70% of the population will get Covid-19. Assuming 65% for the US, that would mean 214M infected, say over 2 years (and assuming linearity, which is naive) and each critical case needing care for a month, we are talking about nearly 18M critical cases per month. So yes, a huge amount of people.
GP lists overall hospital beds per people, which includes ICU beds but also encompasses the "normal" beds, e.g. for people recovering from routine procedures, kids with broken legs etc.
So the US has 277 hospital beds per 100k inhabitants, of which 20-31.7 are intensive care beds.
China has 434 hospital beds per 100k inhabitants, of which 2.8-4.6 are intensive care beds.
I'd say overall this may be one factor for assessing quality of healthcare, but also explains the respective system's focus on ambulant vs. stationary care.
It’s also the case that the US health system disincentivizes preventative care, which may stress our health system even relative to the capacity of beds (more may be used for true emergencies than might be the case for other countries). This will be the first non-localized shock in quite a while and only time will tell how bad it gets here.
The US is relatively short on staffing (we don't try very hard to train doctors, nursing is a reasonably well compensated but unpleasant job, etc).
And then Medicare has a wild model where they work to centralize care at regional hospitals. The local hospital here gets paid more per Medicare procedure by not staffing rooms that it does have (this is basically universal among rural US hospitals that were built more than 10 years ago).
Me. I got fired a year ago January after being out for a month. It took that long with a bad sinus infection and undiagnosed allergies before my doc was willing to prescribe antibiotics due to having previously had c diff, which is a fungus that you apparently cant completely get rid of. C diff also apparently can resurge when on antibiotics. I worked from home during that time, but I was pretty sick.
Just as well, my commute sucked (1-2 hours). Our health insurance sucked. $13k deductible, no vision or dental.
I had interviews the very next week, 2 offers within 3 weeks. Higher salary, way better insurance and a 15 minute commute.
Probably just misunderstood; what you said is a mixed up jumble of bits of actual facts.
C.diff is something that you always have some of (you'll never be rid of it, nobody is), but it usually gets out-competed by other bacteria. But it's exceptionally hard to kill partly because it can form tough spores that go dormant. So if you take powerful antibiotics, there's a good chance that all that'll be left is the c.diff, which gets problematic when there's a lot of it. Fungus is similar in the sense that bacteria compete with it, so killing the bacteria leaves you vulnerable to fungus as well.
This is precisely why you're supposed eat probiotics during certain kinds of treatments. People talk about "healthy gut flora" or whatever like its a new age alternative medicine, but really you just need a ton of different kinds of benign bacteria filling the space so that no particular one strain of pathogen gets enough critical mass to have an effect.
In the US, "physicians" might be less numerous, but there are a lot of highly-skilled intermediary roles that fill the gap -- Physician Assistants, Nurse Practitioners, etc, all perform routine treatment performed by "physicians" in other countries.
US physician training is honestly excessively long, complicated, and expensive (although there are justifications for making it this way), but it's a simplification to point out that there aren't as many doctors, without noting all the other doctor-esque roles with significant overlap.
> it's a simplification to point out that there aren't as many doctors, without noting all the other doctor-esque roles with significant overlap.
Comparing the number of doctors in the US to other countries is not a good measure of anything. But noting that americans spend more per capita and get worse health outcomes is pretty significant.
This is possibly the worst metric as it can mean so many things.
Here [1] we have more numbers.
Most importantly the # of beds seems to correlate strongly to the 'average time in hospital' eg. Japan has 3x beds but stays are 3x longer. That stays are shorter is not an indication of poorer quality.
The US has fewer doctors, about the same nurses, but 3x more MRIs per capita, and probably similar inventories of other kinds of equipment.
As for respirators? Who knows. But The US is a major exporter of medicine, equipment, and they spend considerably more. Just like in every major war there's a 'key weapons system' that wins the day while the underlying economy wins the war ... the US might be in a decent position with enough equipment, and a resilient enough economy and populace to fight coronavirus.
Don't be fooled by Trump's shenanigans, Americans are not fools. When they decide to do whatever they do it in a way that few can match. FYI I'm not American.
There will be ugly issues for those without insurance but I suggest that states will take over there with emergency solutions or else they'll all be voted out of office instantly and they know it. Even Trump isn't stupid enough to fail to recognize that people dying en masse on TV will make him look, in his own terminology 'really, really, really bad'.
Also, thankfully, once again, North America seems to be a tiny bit isolated from the 'rest of the world' and has just enough time to see what's happening in Italy and can possibly act a little sooner on some things.
I expect lock-downs and social distancing measures to take effect earlier in America on an per-capita-infected-basis.
I don't think simple comparisons between Japan and US are meaningful. Japan has a universal health care system so everyone is covered by health insurance. There is little incentive to leave hospitals prematurely.
One of our children spent a week in hospital and the out of pocket cost was 500yen (about $5USD)[1] plus food. My mother in law joked that it was cheaper then childcare.
Hospitals are also not incentivized to mess around with trying to extract the most from billing because its prescribed.
A friend from Australia needed stitches while in Japan and didn't have travel insurance. We went to the local doctor explained the situation and they refereed us to a hospital. They didn't charge us for the consultation because "they didn't do anything, only gave a referral". At the hospital we explained the situation and the bill was less then the excess they would have payed in Australia. My impression is that they didn't feel the need to extract every dollar because they were getting full payment from everyone else.
These are exceptional cases and the usually out of pocket is more like $30~$50 for a consultation.
1. Where we are children cost a flat rate of 500yen for a consultation and as the hospital stay was a result of the consultation that was also covered.
Every other nation on the list has socialized medicine and they leave have considerably shorter hospital stays. Japan is an outlier for their quite long avg. hospital stays.
Given that Merkel today said that 60-70% of German population will likely contract Covid-19 within next 2 years, assuming the mortality rate is 1%, that would translate into half a million deaths; I am wondering why nobody over there is panicking already... Germany went from 20 diagnosed cases to 1600 in about a week.
Having lived through it for the past month here in Hong Kong, please do not panic. I've seen what panicking does, and it really doesn't help anyone. A simple rumour triggered a run on toilet paper, we even had a toilet paper heist, and for what, only to realise there is in fact enough toilet paper.
One recommendation I would make, buy a box of face masks and some hand sanitiser, but only buy the minimum amount you need. I found it absolutely ridiculous that some people here bought all the stock, so that they could keep themselves and their family safe for years, obviously that doesn't help prevent the spread if other people don't have access to those goods.
It seems the measures Hong Kong has taken works, with only around 160 cases so far. I was surprised how quickly it spread over in Europe.
Don't buy face masks. Face masks are useful for keeping germs from others, not to protect you from them. You should wear a face mask if you're sick to limit the amount of saliva you spread when you cough or sneeze. But if you think a face mask is somehow protecting you from others' coronavirus, it's not.
"Professional and Home-Made Face Masks Reduce Exposure to Respiratory Infections among the General Population"
"All types of masks reduced aerosol exposure, relatively stable over time, unaffected by duration of wear or type of activity, but with a high degree of individual variation. Personal respirators were more efficient than surgical masks, which were more efficient than home-made masks. Regardless of mask type, children were less well protected. Outward protection (mask wearing by a mechanical head) was less effective than inward protection (mask wearing by healthy volunteers)."
A properly worn face mask, maybe. But it's good only for 20-30 minutes, then it's soaked from the moisture in your breath and no longer does its job.
From the CDC website: "If you are NOT sick: You do not need to wear a facemask unless you are caring for someone who is sick (and they are not able to wear a facemask). Facemasks may be in short supply and they should be saved for caregivers."
I would say the same, and I personally think having proper hygiene is far more important. Unfortunately here in Hong Kong, it’s almost mandatory to wear a face mask.
That said, it’s known that you can be infected without showing symptoms. So if you only start wearing one when you show symptoms, it might be to late already.
> I would make, buy a box of face masks and some hand sanitiser
I've been looking for these this past week in Arizona, but the shelves have been empty. I started going to all the stores I usually shop at multiple times per day to find something; its a drain on my time and probably increases my risk of getting stuff just by being outside.
I imagine they'll be hard to come by these days, personally I doubt wearing a face mask will make a real difference. From what I've seen here, most of the cases are from people who had close contact with someone who was already infected, be it over dinner, or from family members. Maybe I'm wrong, but I haven't seen any cases from people getting randomly infected on the streets.
At least here in HK I understand, people often come in close contact with strangers, be it on the bus or MTR, of just walking on the streets. But I imagine that in most other countries there's less population density, so it's easier to keep your distance.
They even say it themselves: "Furthermore, we should bear in mind that this is an experimental study, with relatively small numbers of volunteers, which limits the generalisability of some of our findings."
You don't need hand sanitizer; just wash your hands regularly with soap and water, and prefer using disposable paper towels over air blowers (they will aerosolize(?) any water with the virus / bacteria around). This should be a thing anyway.
> I am wondering why nobody over there is panicking already.
because panic isn't really helping anybody and we've never been a particular panicked bunch. Well I guess unless inflation shoots up and we get Weimar PTSD or something. Just about the only thing that seems to really scare anyone. I think the behaviour of the tech companies is mostly theatrical because they love the PR of being at the cutting edge of pandemic behaviour or whatever but these companies employ hyper-aware nerds who probably won't touch their face in the next three month so meh.
>Germany went from 20 diagnosed cases to 1600 in about a week.
We also only had two deaths or so up until now so I think the conclusion here is that the disease is severely underdiagnosed in other countries with the exception of South Korea. We were able to diagnose so many cases because we have a relatively decentralised medical infrastructure who all have relatively high capacity.
That's one possibility; the other is what is happening in Italy right now, i.e. initial 2 weeks of infections are done and now the severe cases remain and pass away. Like in South Korea 98% cases are in progress, so the outcome is not known yet and making any stats out of those is premature (i.e. too optimistic). I'd say nobody is going to shut down whole megalopolis cities if it was just a more severe flu...
That's one possibility; the other is what is happening in Italy right now, i.e. initial 2 weeks of infections are done and now the severe cases remain and pass away. Like in South Korea 98% cases are in progress, so the outcome is not known yet and making any stats out of those is premature (i.e. too optimistic)
I think you're putting forward a weirdly deceptive view that the two possibilities (under-diagnosis and long-dying-process) are exclusive. It seems extremely likely both factors are involved in current statistics - nothing in one excludes the other.
A nation that's systematically testing and finding all the cases will start with a lower death rate and watch it creep upward - but for the manageable number of cases they will see as they get patient quarrantine. A nation or region that's not systematically testing will have a high death and high recovery rate as they only see cases after the fact but then they'll see all cases spike, their health system overwhelmed and things in a mess (ie, Italy now, Hubei earlier).
I'm heartened that the US is now finding more cases rather than just seeing more death but clearly the US slacking on testing and surveillance.
Italy has one of the best healthcare systems in the world. It's more of a policy problem in their case. We will see Germany in the next 1-2 weeks when the severe cases might start developing en masse.
we also have the cruise ship though or the death rates outside of Wuhan in China (about 0.7% so far) and they have a lot of recovered cases. Rather than everyone somehow lagging behind Italy's death rate I think it's likely that they have just lost the plot and there's a huge number of cases under the radar.
>I'd say nobody is going to shut down whole megalopolis cities if it was just a more severe flu.
I mean a severe flu by a factor of five or so is basically what this is, it's just that this in and of itself is really, really bad because nobody has the capacity to handle that many cases.
Flu typically doesn't need breathing apparatus. I think in 1-2 months we will know much more and will have better stats. Until then I think treating it as R0 > 2 and mortality rate of 1-2% would serve us well.
Neither does this virus, typically. However some people end up having severe complications, as do people with the flu which is why the latter causes a few ten thousand deaths each year in the US, and half a million worldwide.
The issue here really is a matter of quantity. Covid-19 is not a mysterious super disease, but it is dangerous enough to overstress an unprepared healthcare system.
The cruise ship isn’t a good test of anything because the healthcare the infected received wasn’t under strain and resource limited like it will be when widespread infection hits. I get why people cling to its example out of optimism, but look at the reality in Italy now for a better example of what things will look like further out, and what most people will face.
Well, Italy is not how things have to be further out. Health system can system prepare before hand (they aren't, it seems but still).
Also, if the entire population of Northern Italy was infected and mortality rate was .5%, you would be seeing 13K deaths (which isn't impossible given the situation but far from 6-700 deaths so far).
Which is to say, you're right that infection on a large scale is far more problematic than infection on a small scale but I don't think infection on a large necessarily contradicts the Diamond Princess results. A lot of people can die and it is social catastrophe even with percent of the entire population.
a) I think you meant 80000 deaths (northern italy has maybe 15 Mio inhabitants), b) so according to your calculation, there should be about 140000 cases closed by now?
Wikipedia gives a figure of 27 million for Northern Italy[1].
But I want to be clear that nothing I said above is anything like a solid prediction, just a pure back-of-the-envelope rough comparison. There's nothing I'm going to predict here.
My understanding is that the opposite is happening in Italy: the severe cases have been found, but it takes time for the mild cases to (and the non fatal ones) to be marked as recovered.
Many of the mild infections will never be known about (and thus never be counted as a case at all). There may have been no symptoms, or the symptoms may have been minor enough that the person thought it was a cold. Because of this the case fatality rate is a terrible metric to use to try to estimate expected deaths, or your own risk if you contract the virus.
1% might be the case fatality rate, but it's likely at least an order of magnitude higher than the real mortality rate. With estimates of asymptomatic / minor symptoms people above 80%, most infections are not being recorded as cases.
>1% of the population dies every year. Mortality rate increases with age for COVID. So if you assume 1% deaths over a two year period it'd increase deaths by 50% for two years, mostly of people with low life expectancy. This is obviously bad but I find it unlikely that it would have a lasting impact on society.
In estimating the real fatality rate of this virus as 1%, there is a built-in assumption that all infections have been reported as cases, which seems wildly optimistic. Given that >=80% of infections may be asymptomatic or have minor symptoms, it's very likely that the case fatality rate is much higher than the real fatality rate.
Current mortality rates are around 3-4%. A mortality rate of 1% already assumes a large number of unreported cases. I saw estimates of 0.7% but they seem wildly optimistic in how many people having reported.
1% only assumes 66-75% unreported cases. With estimates of asymptomatic/low-severity infections above 80%, the ratio of infections that never get reported as cases is likely to be higher than that.
I think this based on the assumption that R0 is about 2.3. That means that on average, one infected person infects 2.3 other persons. Then you need to have about 60 percent of population to get immunity against the virus by first being infected with it. At that point you reach the threshold for herd immunity and the disease will soon stop spreading.
However, R0 is not a constant. For example, with good hygiene, avoiding human contacts etc it is possible to lower the rate of average number of persons each sick person infects. If we manage to do that, the threshold for herd immunity will be lower than 60 %.
If people die of COVID-19 instead of other health problems like strokes, then that's not a major problem. The question is how many additional deaths will there be.
Because the economy is the most important "voter" in here. No one is willing to (short-term) damage the economy for the sake of protecting it long-term.
As a citizen, you can remove yourself from travel and gatherings. The scaling of an outbreak is non-linear, so the choices of individuals have an outsized effect.
My wife and I have both led by example in both choosing to work from home early on and arguing strenuously that our employers should make WFH company/University policy (which has now happened).
Be leading by example and staying home, you make everyone else safer. If the effective R_0 can be brought below 1, the outbreak will burn out. We must show our care for those who cannot fight this virus by staying home, connecting electronically, and practicing good hygiene.
Well, but the things an individual citizen can do can affect that individual citizens life, right? Have your elderly family taken care of try to prevent them from getting the disease, practicing good hygiene, staying at home if possible, having a proper stock of food and any medicine that anyone in your family needs, all these things can individually help you and your family, even if the rest of the country is not doing anything.
Look at Hong Kong, which spontaneously cleared the streets to fight the virus. With the protest movements, the government couldn't clear the streets. The trust in the authorities is minimal. But people chose to stay in. I have seen it suggested that this response is simply because HK remembers SARS.
Quarantines are hard to enforce with brute force. Consent of the governed will make this all way, way easier.
I think China's and HK's experience with SARS made a big difference in the response. The US has no such experience in
living memory, so there is no collective gut understanding that epidemics are best dealt with decisively and kept small.
Once China's national government took the response seriously, the instantaneous and speedy construction of hospitals was really impressive. We see a little bit of that here in Seattle, with quarantine sites/hotels being prepared, but nothing on the scale which may be required.
Coordination helps, but the individual is not powerless.
I do not need a central authority to tell me to care for those around me. Furthermore, we can use our voices and examples to convince others to make choices that are likely to help others. It isn't perfect, it doesn't always work, but in this instance, I am certain that it helps.
The stats came from yesterday’s European daily status report, which were the most current as of the time I posted (and where all of these other trackers get their numbers).
I see that the numbers on the same link have now updated to today’s stats, and there have been 2 deaths and 1139 cases in Germany. It doesn’t change the point I was making in the slightest, which is that Germany has a death rate far, far below 1%.
>It doesn’t change the point I was making in the slightest, which is that Germany has a death rate far, far below 1%.
The death rate is calculated by dead / (dead + recovered). The there are 2 deaths in Germany and 18 recoveries. That's 10%. This is probably skewed higher right now since they're not testing people with only mild symptoms.
Your stats are more out of date than this. There are now more than zero deaths in Germany, and presumably the death toll will grow substantially from here, like it has in every other country with COVID-19 infections.
You clearly didn’t bother reading the words in the post you’re replying to: 2 deaths in Germany as of today.
These are the official European statistics from today. The ones from my original post were the official numbers from yesterday. These numbers are not out of date.
Reaction in Switzerland has been quite intense. All public events above 150 people require cantonal approval, above 1000 are banned outright. The government is recommending wfh for everyone who can, and many employers are following this.
Today all educational institutions (primary schools, secondary schools, _all_ universities), cinemas, theatres etc. have been closed with an initial timespan of 2 weeks. A lot of employers are switching to wfh.
Though with the exception that if you can't take care of your children, you can bring them to their primary school.
A lot of companies in London are waiting for the 100 cases in London mark to trigger the WFH fallback. This will be breached tomorrow so expect London tech companies to be totally remote by end of week.
That's not accurate. Most FAANG offices in EU are already in "recommended WFH" mode. If anything, US offices of those companies are currently not implementing "mandatory WFH".
What is the benefit of delaying until a country reaches Italy’s levels? If Italy’s measurements are considered proper at the current levels of the outbreak, why not be proactive and start earlier?
Also, there is no confidence in our government to react swiftly these days. So we are forced to assume the government is non-functional, which generates a lot of speculative behaviors. We'll find out if any of it works, but it will be hard to unpack for a while.
We'll see, but I think this "lack of confidence" is much more an artifact of crappy reporting than crappy reactions by public health organizations. The test kit snafu seems like an unforced error though. It is going to be close, but it seems like test kit ramp up that is going on now will satisfy our needs. Fingers crossed.
There's also the endemic distrust in this culture of centralized decision-making - a mechanism which, unfortunately, is irreplaceable in situations like this.
Because while the U.S. may be "advanced" in a few areas, healthcare sure is not one of them. So, the powers-that-be in the U.S. are afraid that the rest of our American population will (finally) realize how bad healthcare is here. ;-)
People like to complain about US health care but it's still one of the best in the world. If you look at survival rates, the US tends to score pretty well. The system is certainly expensive and not always available to everyone, but it still offers very high quality care to a large percentage of the population. Both research and care are also well funded and may be able to afford new treatments faster than other countries.
Find me this survival rates statistic. Nothing I can find corroborates your claim. Here is some good data that shows off the poor U.S. healthcare system:
I was referring to the stats on this Wikipedia page[1]. But even the page you linked says that while life expectancy is lower and disease burden is higher, people admitted to hospital have an equal or even better chance of recovery compared to other countries, depending on the illness. So the US population is sicker but hospitals are probably not the problem.
In Cyprus all universities and schools closed down today with only 2 confirmed cases. Again this I believe is because the health infrastructure is not adequate to treat people in case of a pandemic therefore precautions are more important.
Is it though? Google's a big company, but most others are plugging along as normal. A few events have been canceled, but isn't that true for Europe also? Of course, that's ignoring Italy, which has been severely burned.
I'll bite, and try nicely to point out the elephant in the room that a large portion of US citizens have not given a fuck about this, or were not properly aware of the danger of a health crisis until a week ago.
Last night I saw on the news that Germany is implementing roadside symptom checks to keep people from overwhelming hospitals, so is definitely a strong reaction there, if somewhat different in its execution.
It's a system Korea trialed and that worked quite well. From what I've seen it's really just a container on a parking lot. Instead of potentially infected people walking through the hospital they administer tests in their car. It's very cheap and easy to set up, I believe American hospitals would also be quick in setting those up if they run out of capacity.
In addition to other reasons, a lot of colleges are about to enter Spring Break. So, a bunch of college kids are going to all go party together, spread it to each other, and then all come home.
More than one Portuguese university has suspended in-person classes. Many events are cancelled too, and soccer games won't have spectators. They're also talking about moving the upcoming school calendar interruption (usually happens right before Easter) to this Friday, in order to close them.
I think Germany is probably a lost cause and the majority of their population will get the virus. Higher population density, open borders / lack of geographic isolation, aging population - none of those things help them any.
Sadly, I think the majority of (much larger) US population will get the virus, too. H1N1, for instance, affected 57 million people in the US and caused almost 12K deaths. And COVID19 is much deadlier than H1N1, so we're probably looking at a low six figure death toll at least, when all is said and done, no matter what we do. I'd be surprised if we manage to escape this outcome.
> Higher population density, open borders / lack of geographic isolation, aging population
That describes most EU countries. Germany is neither much older than the others nor more interconnected. Population density is high but that's the case for many countries in Western Europe.
Um, yes? The rest of Europe will be hit pretty hard as well. Likely harder than the US. Cursory googling shows that Germany has 21.46% of people 65 and older. France has ~1.5% fewer. Italy has about 1.34% more. The US, however, only has 16.03% of such people or 5.43% fewer than Germany. I'd say the US is looking at lower infection rate (because people are more spread out) and fewer deaths, too (because fewer people are in the 65+ group which has been dying primarily).
I'm not sure about the lower infection rate, even rural communities are quite interconnected. But obviously death rates are likely proportional to the number of older people. So the US should fare better.
However, hospital admissions in Italy are now at a median age of 65, so a younger population doesn't help hospitals, it just lowers mortality.
Maybe because our government isn't doing shit to speak of at almost any level and we have no idea how bad the spread is here given the lack of testing and information coming out. Last I checked, we had around a thousand confirmed cases but have only tested a few thousand. It's a disaster. Also wfh is much more acceptable here and common especially at tech companies.
Norway has requested that large employers to have employees work from home so that they avoid the potential to contract/pass on the disease either in the office or in public transit.
> not many US companies are encouraging or requiring their employees to work from home
My company does not do WFH at all. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't want to be 100% WFH (when there isn't a deadly plague going around, that is), but I think having one or two WFH days a week on a regular basis would be awesome for getting some dev tasks done.
I have a nice home office, that mostly goes unused during the week :(
There is no universal health care, and the fewer employees who get sick, the less money a company has to pay out in health expenditures/insurance plan premiums for the next billing cycle.
Also, this means that if you are out of work, you could easily die from preventable illnesses and nobody would really care.
Merkel just said she expects 70% of Germany to be infected "and the room fell silent".
Maybe its just Germany efficiency and pragmatism of just acknowledging some people are going to die and some pension obligations will disappear. Whereas the rest of us are trying not to let those thoughts surface.
The source is supposedly a "respected virologist" from the Charite hospital in Berlin. He started a daily podcast related to COVID-19 [1], but I did not have a chance to find this quote yet.
EDIT: That same virologist also warned about a "second wave" of cases starting this fall, after a reduction during summer, due to seasonal strength of the immune system.
> And theories why the reaction in the US is or seems to be more intense?
Have you seen how much the tv news networks are loving this? The 24 hour "BREAKING NEWS" about COVID-19 is enough to send your average Joe into a panic.
It's interesting that Google only recommends it but doesn't make it mandatory. I also wonder how many of those people that do want to work remote end up going to coffee shops and/or order food from postmates where the delivery guy is all around town and the employee still ends up getting contaminated with the virus and spreading it in their household.
My job (at Google) would be pretty damn hard if I couldn't duck into the office to do certain tasks. I work on hardware devices. I can get by working remotely for a bit, but there are certain things I need physical access to. I will commute in for a short visit tomorrow to pick up and flash some devices, etc. then turn around and come home. I suspect others will be doing similar things. Mandatory WFH at this point would be very tricky.
But as others have pointed out, we really are being messaged to stay home if possible, and I think that's very responsible.
Honestly, going into work should be fine - as long as precautions are taken. Everyone washes their hands, things get cleaned more often (especially shared things like handrails, door handles, bathrooms, HVAC systems, etc).
Yep, not a Googler, but as a hardware person, I have been preparing my "on-the-go lab equipment" in case my workplace gets shut down. I also have a few devices I will actually be writing firmware for and testing with the lab equipment. This is probably a bit different than Google where the hardware is a under tighter control.
My main concern is that my good gear is all at my workspace, so even if I have the hardware device I'm working on with me, I can't troubleshoot it unless I have my gear.
'Recommend' is pretty tame for the steps that are being taken. It is more like "if you can WFH, absolutely do so." To the extent that people are taking monitors etc. home with them.
Even if 10% of the people still come into the office, it will still reduce the spread dramatically. The 90% of people who WFH won't get it from a co-worker. The 10% who go to the office will have way more physical space than normal and have an actual shot at keeping some distance between themselves and others.
Also, they might just be expecting their employees to be adults about things and do the responsible thing even if not forced to. Basically the honor system.
I actually prefer it this way.
1. I do not need to attend any meetings in person, so that is good. No forced contact or seating near infected people.
2. Because I live close to work (less than 20 minutes), I do drop in to office after our daily standup to get 4-6 hours of focussed work.
There are people around, maybe just 5%, maybe 10%, but some people are definitely in office probably because they all find it easier focus in an empty office than at home, partly because of other family members going in and out, and partly because you are so used to working at your desk.
You can ask the delivery person to leave it in front of your door and heat/microwave it.
Anyway, some risk is inherent if you are depending on someone else preparing/bringing your meal, there is only so much you can do, but remote still helps a little to reduce exposure imo.
Food itself is meant to be safe. So as long as you wash your hands right before eating this doesn't seem any less safe.
I'd like to understand how eating food prepared elsewhere is safe though as it seems like the perfect delivery mechanism from someones hands to your mouth.
I'm in the greater Seattle area. Anything getting delivered to my house gets immediately transferred to the garage (without direct skin contact), where it's sitting for about a week before I open it.
Not just NA, all EMEA employees are recommended to WFH as well, with the exception of Italy, which is mandatory WFH. Anyone know how other companies in FAANG are handling EU offices? Situation there seems direr than the U.S...
Obviously with a company that large you can't generalize either way, but many are fresh out of school living either alone or with other Googlers, and most definitely don't have much in their fridges. Freezers though are probably packed.
I usually go grocery shopping regularly, but this past weekend included me helping some friends stock up on the basics (driving them to and from the store, walking them through the aisles).
Buying food at restaurants is still an option for now, although not every Googler budgets for that. In my opinion, it feels like a lot more food service workers are wearing gloves, too.
I was fresh out of school >10 years ago, and until last week never kept more than a day or two of food at home, aside from a container of emergency rations.
Walking for every meal is good way to stay healthy in general (just not during a pandemic.)
An interesting thought experiment but I would suspect that there needs to be some additional fact pattern there before you could show liability: knowledge that some employees had recently travelled to hot spots or were symptomatic, the meeting was in violation of official public health directives, etc.
Honestly, getting sick is out of your control and you should get paid as normal while staying at home and sickening it out; not offering this makes people go to work when sick, making other people sick, and causing much higher financial damage to the company.
I mean sure, most people have no problems muscling through a cold, but there may be others who will be floored by it for longer, or spread it to their families, etc. Is you not missing a day of work worth more to your employer than someone else missing a week? Or their life in the case of corona.
Different states have different statues, many (maybe most?) exclude communicable diseases. Even in states without that restriction you’d be burdened by showing the disease came from someone at work. On the other hand if you could show negligence on behalf of an employer facilitating the spread of COVID19 massive lawsuits would mediate the shutdown of the U.S. economy.
Given that this is a pandemic, and Trump is very interested in winning re-election in the fall, I suspect money will become available to keep people solvent if they get sick. (Plus he said exactly that yesterday in his news conference)
I predict that one of the mid term outcomes of the pandemic will be that all those people in (food) production, logistics (including retail), care and infrastructure that require personal presence will be far more aware of the non-bullshit nature of their jobs than before. Particularly in contrast to the mind workers who can switch to WFH and who, with few exceptions, could stop work for an entire year and society at large would hardly notice. Expect those still leaving their homes for work in two weeks to end the year far more aware of relative pie slice sizes than they were a year earlier.
That would be wonderful. One of the reasons I liked recent UBI proposals is because it jury are nonwage replacing but would do a lot to balance out the understood value of low-training-&-skilled-physical jobs.
Citi (C) has 200K FTE ... they are starting to roll out a shifted WFH to only have partial teams in office and some departments are doing more if their functions allow.
Microsoft has about 150k employees and recommended all work from home if they can. Google is around 100k. I don't know who's bigger than Microsoft that also did this.
Tough act to follow for Wallmart... The tech industry has a huge advantage here.
But there are jobs where you'd have the possibility to do this in industries that will take some re-arranging to make it work. Legal and financial for instance, call centers (some technical issues), most design and creative work.
The impossible ones are anything involving care, production and logistics. Even retail could in principle be done but it would require a massive shift on the part of the consumer. Going shopping is very much ingrained and retooling that industry for home delivery is neither fast nor simple when done on a massive scale.
The problem is, Walmart can't shut down. They're the only grocery/drug store left in a lot of smaller towns. People depend on them for necessities. They can shut down most of their departments, the non-essential ones, but they're gonna need the grocery and pharmacy sections to remain open.
They don't need to. If office workers stay home and people can go shopping outside of rush hour, grocery workers should be mostly safe. Especially Walmarts tend to be rather large, it's certainly avoidable to be in close contact with customers there.
It is hard to track IBM because they have so much change, but for many years IBM has already been a largely WFH culture. I know they recently tried to change that, but not sure how much of the culture they changed.
We did some work with IBM a few years ago and my boss said when he went for an on-site visit it was basically a giant office building that was mostly vacant.
So far no official wfh which is troublesome considering we had engineers going to Singapore, South Korea, Japan, and Italy who are based out of my office the last month. No way I am going in to the office. Oh and we have a Korean embassy in our building as well.
Where I work they don't allow any, at all. So if you're out, say to take care of a sick relative for a few weeks, you can't make up any time, or get credit for trying to stay up to date. Even if there's something urgent and you end up spending hours in teleconference and then more time working on the issue, you're not allowed to put those hours in to your time sheet as time worked.
When I was there as a software engineer, I worked from home one day a week.
But at least at a few years ago, you couldn't work from home full-time forever. I knew folks in the Atlanta office, and after it closed they could work from home for a long while (many weeks), but needed to eventually find a position at another office or leave the company.
It comes down to how lenient your manager is, but the official policy was you're only allowed to work from home in exceptional circumstances (like you have someone coming over to work on your house), and they look askance at doing it more than a couple times per month.
Ironically, the Atlanta office is now expanding again. Turns out that closing it was a big mistake re: making diversity goals. I could've told them that ...
Data analysis, some related programming. All stuff I could do from home. And have done from home: For my first kid I was allowed to work from home a few days a week. Then at some point a single employee, literally one, was found abusing WFH (had a second FT job) and the whole practice was banned.
> Then virus is "a small price to pay for salvation".
I try not to take HN or Reddit too seriously, because God knows that I was an idiot in my younger years too. But man, I really do hate this website some days.
I think, I just completly useless when it comes to empathy. I was like that in 18, 25 and as you can see now at 33.
Another thong is that there is broader context to what I wrote. My context was that I found it ironic how suffering of thousands improves something for other thousands so obviously plus for some other it moves the cause hence the quote seemed appropriate to express that irony.
It's interesting how suddenly remote work becomes so attractive.Just yesterday I sat in the management meeting, where calls for remote work were getting much louder from the side of the company that'd previously refuse to even entertain such an idea.
If we are able to contain the coronavirus this way, can we take advantage of the quarantines around the world and eradicate the flu and cold at the same time?
I honestly don't understand why people think hiding out at home is the solution. How can we possibly hunker down and hide in our four walls for the 6-12 months it would take for this to maybe fade?
If the disease is only communicable for a few weeks after a person gets the virus, and everyone hunkers down for a month, then it should seriously impede an exponential rise in infections.
The idea is that by reducing density (and thus community transmission), you flatten the curve and minimize the number of people concurrently infected. This reduces strain on a fixed healthcare resource pool and avoids situations like we saw in Wuhan.
Like the other post said, reducing the overall number of people infected is good, but spreading out the curve is absolutely essential to avoid completely overloading the health care system. Given the nature of an unmitigated exponential and the fact that there is an incubation time, by the time hospitals start filling up you are bound for chaos a few weeks later with nothing you can do about it.
Which ones are? I believe last week they quarantined their Seattle offices & this week they've done Bay Area (& it sounds like Google is taking this even further). I'm sure the reason it's "slow" is that it's logistically challenging to figure out policies for this as its totally unprecedented (policies here include figuring out how to handle all the special/unique cases they didn't think through originally because it's so rushed).
Why are comments saying no more paywall links getting downvoted. Some of the top comments are always hating on sources not to post from and no one mentions paywall linked.
I'm excited to be starting in Mountain View soon but I'm pretty apprehensive about having an effective orientation and getting up to speed if everyone's working from home. I've read that orientation is supposed to be a big event where you meet tons of people from around the world and learn together about internal Google tech and culture. I would hate to miss out on that experience because of the coronavirus fears.
Yes, orientation week is nice and you do get to meet a lot of people from offices around the world. You'd sit through a lot of training that introduces you to Google culture. You get to be in a room of a whole bunch of people that are experiencing the same impostor syndrome as you are.
So, yes, missing it will be a bummer.
You will, however, have plenty of other chances. There's still plenty of opportunity to learn, and your team will give you lots of guidance. It'll feel like you are lost, but believe me, most people will feel like that during their first few months at Google anyway.
Take your time, and invest in yourself. Ask for help when you need it. Have a plan for feeling like you are not contributing. You will be; it just takes time.
The best thing you can do as a Noogler now is stay home unless asked. The fewer people who are on main campus makes it safer for the people that do really need to be there. I'll be at home also.
Or, as Sundar tweeted: "Contributing to social distancing if you are able to, helps the overall community spread and most importantly, will help offset the peak loads through critical healthcare systems and also saves it for people in need."
I went through big-global-company orientation three times (intern, FTE, 6 month follow up). Every single time I got sick. Spending all day in a room with unfamiliar pathogens from 50 countries is risky under the best of circumstances.
Another Googler (joined late 2016). I would say that the orientation has been pretty scripted for a while given the volume of new candidates. It's actually other of the things I would expect to go most smoothly over GVC (video conference) or live stream. Meeting your actual team and learning from them by overhearing conversations and answering questions is going to be the real challenge. I recommend asking to be added to more meetings than you usually would, so you have maximum opportunity to call in and absorb information.
It's mostly training classes that are equally valuable some remotely, plus some "forced fun" events and playing with the campus toys. It might be healthier to miss it and avoid getting the misleading summer college experience of (dis)orientation.
Yes, it's not optimal, but based on my experience I think you'll be fine without the normal orientation.
I would worry more about the actual crisis the world is going through (not that I'm saying you need to be overly worried, just that in context, that's the bigger issue).
Please try not to escalate unnecessarily, be it in this post or this health crisis.
I don't detect any disrespect or lack of empathy. It's acknowledgement of the seriousness of the situation combined with concern for secondary adverse effect on their experience/career.
Can people please stop posting paywall’d links? It’s annoying to only being able to read the headline. If this is just a thing because I’m in Canada then that’s different.
