This is a massive accidental experiment on the effectiveness of fully remote teams. Most of these companies are fairly reticent to have even a few workers remote, let alone entire teams/orgs.
It'll be interesting to see if teams push for something closer to full remote wherever it worked well (or if some employees will want it, having not realized what it was like).
Plausibly teams that it works well for will have greater ammunition to push for it, since they have the past experience with it.
I have no desire to have a long term remote job. I want to work in the office. However, I've opted to be remote for a couple weeks after someone in the office tested positive for COVID-19. My productivity is noticeably lower (for me at least). I would imagine such a radically different work environment would take time for anyone to adapt to.
I prefer to sit with my team[0]. Better, more spontaneous communication, and better team spirit. It's fun to have lunch together. But considering the circumstances, I can totally understand working remote. I'm doing it today for different reasons, but I'm seriously considering doing it next week because of Corona.
[0] Which is a problem at my current office where all desks are officially flex, which means anyone can sit anywhere.
Same here. I stayed at home and worked remotely for one day last week. I've done about 30% of my regular workload. Granted, I was seek and I am in a management position, overseeing 20+ employees, but still.
I am wondering what your home set up is. A few years ago I built a full mirror setup of my work environment at home (the hardware) and that decrease in friction really helped with the mental ability to get started and in the 'flow'.
I feel the same way. I need a change of environment in order to be fully productive. Whether it's a cafe next door or an office, doesn't matter as long as it's not my home.
Personally I noticed it help me if I did my usual routine but instead of going to work I'd go work at home. What I mean by this is that i'd wake up at my normal time, wear actual work clothes and fully prepare myself like I'd usually do going to the office. Gets my head in the right space.
I tried that but quite frankly, it's enormously dangerous: libraries are not meant to be a workplace and as such, for example, there (usually) is an explicit exclusion of responsibility in case of stolen goods.
Basically, if you work from the library and your work laptop gets stolen, it's only your fault, cannot blame on anyone else.
And that's right, in my opinion.
At least coworking spaces usually provide some kind of storage (lockers for example).
Maybe I'm paranoid but I never leave my laptop behind in the car or in a coffee shop to go to the bathroom. Given how much access you might have to different systems.... Could be very painful. Maybe that's psycho. But would do the same at the library.
My library is a no-go in my opinion. They have meeting rooms, sure, but each 6-8-person room is occupied by one college student studying alone. So its share a table with strangers or nothing.
If this works well I will eat my hat. This represents: companies with no remote-work culture (thus systems that are not fully documented, etc.), forcing employees into this suddenly (so they will not have a proper space at home set up for this... some of them will be in the same room as a crying baby), while their spouse may also be working from home due to the virus, while everyone is also thinking about getting a deadly virus every time they leave the house. I really don't expect much "work" to get done at all.
> while everyone is also thinking about getting a deadly virus every time they leave the house
Am I the only person who isn't worried about the coronavirus? I'm not exaggerating when I say it hasn't effected my life at all, except for the effort it took me to write this comment. I live in San Francisco, if it matters.
It's always difficult to determine and conceptualize personal risk, but in this case, maybe even harder: people are caught between the extremes of "I'm healthy, and it's very unlikely to harm me", vs. "this may kill millions of people around the globe unless we get lucky, and/or are very serious about the measures we take to contain it". (Both of these statements are true [for most people] yet seem irreconcilable.)
So you staying at home and not getting the virus probably doesn't make much of a difference to you, aside from not feeling crappy for a couple of weeks. But if we all do it, then on a population scale it will make a difference, as it's one of the actions that can contribute towards preventing potentially millions of people dying.
You might not feel that you would ever be responsible for transmitting the virus to a vulnerable person who then dies, and that might be true... but again on a population scale, someone is responsible, and that infection could potentially have been prevented by this (and other) measures.
I'm not hugely _personally_ worried about dying of it; people my age in otherwise good health in developed countries usually don't. I am definitely worried about its impact on others, though, and also its impact on society. Especially as it spreads in the west; for better or for worse, China was far better set up for this than most of the world. Some western countries are still basically denying that it's a problem, which has the potential to make things _much_ worse.
For older people, in particular, death rates for over 70s are truly worrying.
I'm not exaggerating when I say it hasn't effected my life at all, except for the effort it took me to write this comment. I live in San Francisco, if it matters.
San Francisco just reported its first cases today, but there's definitely been panic shopping. The city closed down Lowell today as a precautionary measure (but that leaves nearly 200 campuses open).
Even if you don't suffer any health or financial effects (unlikely) you'll still be effected if:
- More schools close, even more if parents have to take time off from work en masse
- Public transit becomes a big vector and BART or Muni try to shut down or reduce service
- People continue to panic shop. NPR had a photo from a Marin Target with shelves bare of disinfectant wipes. Rainbow in the city was almost completely out of canned tomatoes on Monday.
- On a federal level, if our idiot president succeeds in closing the Mexican border you'll definitely feel some pain
I also thought as a relatively young person there's not much to be too worried about.
However it turned out permanent and serious lung damage can occur even if the individual recovers from the disease. That certainly changed my perspective a bit. It would serve everyone well to err on the cautious side.
You might be fine, if you are young, you probably won't even notice it, however your older parents or grandparents might pass away two weeks after you meet them while being infectious...
"Precautionary decisions do not scale. Collective safety may require excessive individual risk avoidance, even if it conflicts with an individual's own interests and benefits. It may require an individual to worry about risks that are comparatively insignificant."
As with any potential threat, people take it to the extremes. Same with climate change. On one side you have the "I don't really think it's a thing, it isn't influencing me at all" folks, on the other side you have hardcore preppers and "Humanity as we know it will end in few years I can't wait to repopulate the Earth".
Huh? I’m pretty confused by this attitude. This seems pretty callous.
Obviously, media hype train is in full swing, but this is fairly infectious and fairly dangerous for those over 80 and those with other risk factors. That’s narrow, but it is not nothing.
Personal risk is pretty low for me (at my age/health status), but I’m still not super interested in getting knocked on my ass for a week. Particularly since coronavirus immunity is not believed to last for a particularly long period if time. I definitely don’t want it twice!
It’s nothing, because people can’t do anything other than wash their hands and not touch their faces. The media hype is a problem because it causes supply chain issues. People over 80 are always at risk of the flu and other crap, and again, the only thing to do is properly wash your hands and not touch your face.
I would be a lot of money that you touch your face dozens - if not hundreds of times - a day, just like everyone else. It's a normal human reaction to multiple stimuli. There's a video spreading on reddit right now of the talking heads regurgitating the same advice you're giving now, they usually last about a few seconds after telling others not to, before touch their face.
This seems non-sequitor? The main infection route is airborne droplets. Sure, washing your hands reduces risk, but it does not solve the problem. Showering is a good idea, but not relevant.
Or the people bringing it to your country in the first place. Traveling from an infected country is reckless and disrespectful for the lack of better words.
I am not either. I see a disconnect between the numbers published by the WHO and the alarmist reaction of the mainstream media. Earlier this week there was a speech from the director of the WHO on the front page of hn suggesting the virus was less contagious than the flu, I don’t see any mention in any major newspapers. It feels like one of these “facts that don’t fit the narrative will be simply omitted”.
I am concerned however about the overreaction to the virus. Like I am not concerned about catching it, but I am having second thoughts about a holiday trip in south Asia I wanted to make next month as I don’t want to find myself jailed for weeks in a military barrack for some unnecessary quarantine. And my biggest concern is the economic impact.
Hopefully this thing will go away in 2/3 months as the northern hemisphere gets warmer.
I mean, "less contagious than the flu" is a bit like saying "less poisonous than cyanide"; the flu is very contagious. If you have something that's less contagious than the flu but much more lethal than the flu, that's pretty scary.
I'm almost sure it won't work. Everything you mentioned is true but there's one even more important thing. There are plenty of people who literally don't care or dislike their jobs and would take every opportunity to work as little as possible. While this might work for Google & co. where employees are relatively happy and passionate about their work, it would fail spectacularly in other environments.
Also I don't think management can be fully blamed for dismissing remote work as it would represent a considerable cost-cutting opportunity. It's likely not worth it as the overall productivity would drop too much.
Which of these companies have you actually worked for? Microsoft, intel and Google, (3 I've worked for) can go 100% remote in the software side anytime.
I had a similar insider story being recounted to me recently about one of the previous worldwide outbreaks (I think it was SARS).
The French administration at large was extremely reluctant to allow remote work, even very occasionally, if at all, purely by policy. Then the outbreak happened and people started calling in sick.
But when you're calling in sick, chances are you've already been contagious, and so the body count started to go way up, until people started asking to work remotely instead because it was obvious their work could be carried remotely and they just did not want to become sick, because it just made sense.
Which was denied. Because policy.
So people started calling in fake sick (sometimes with direct management being complicit) and worked from home anyway. And then upper management realised that... it worked! People that were marked as sick (but were not, this was a thinly veiled secret) were actually working, and quite efficiently to boot.
And ever since that outbreak the policy changed, and remote work is now a thing. Maybe not like big-R remote, but at least it went from an outright systemic impossibility to being possible.
Those teams will ultimately walk away from this with proof that WFH “doesn’t work.” Distributed teams can work, it just takes a different set of organizational structures that keep people engaged and visible, structures that aren’t in place due the sudden nature of the virus.
Although I'm not sure that's necessarily an unfair reaction - compatibility with remote work isn't the only relevant factor when building organizational structures.
It may not go as well as would if it weren't so sudden though. I'd say that affects the results when comparing for a company that optimizes for remote.
Microsoft is remote-friendly, and has the infrastructure for it. Team culture varies, but that also changed a lot overall - it used to be that you had to specifically ask people to create meetings with videoconferencing enabled, but now it seems to be the norm.
We have a few remote employees in the company I work for (I'm one of them), there are still some things we could do better, but it works well. When there were strikes and it got difficult for people to go to the office, many worked remotely. It worked well since we already had the tools and processes in place, and some colleagues who were skeptical about being able to work remotely discovered they liked it.
In companies with no remote workers and with no tooling/processes in place, it could backfire.
My employer dislikes remote work, many will disagree, but I’ll explain why…
The company makes video games and as you can probably guess being creative is very important. Working from home reduces the creativity of every employee not just because the existing tools for telecommute are insufficient to create a good work environment but also because it prevents people from socializing with spontaneity. Add to this the fact that many of the game developers and designers need special hardware (different game consoles, VPN routers, high speed Internet, interactive pen displays, additional software licenses, etc) that the company would have to buy for every single person to maintain the quality and development speed they have from working on-site.
The founders were forced, due to CORVID-19, to implement an emergency protocol in case we have to move all operations off-site. The IT department was already tasked to setup VPN access for all employees, to buy a bunch of expensive equipment, to spend countless of hours training senior programmers and artists in the arts of online meetings, network troubleshooting, activation of software licenses and who knows what else.
I worked for a remote-first company for roughly five years and it was great, but the business was completely different. My team was responsible for the provisioning and management of different cloud services, in fact all our products were Software as a Service (SaaS) so having a reliable Internet connection and a good enough computer was enough to do our job including leadership, management, marketing, engineering, sales, support, etc.
I cannot see this happening in a game studio, it just doesn’t work. I may be wrong but I think there is not a single game studio in the industry with a fully remote work policy. If there are, I bet their success cannot compare with studios of the same size working all on-site.
> many of the game developers and designers need special hardware (different game consoles, VPN routers, high speed Internet, interactive pen displays, additional software licenses, etc) that the company would have to buy for every single person to maintain the quality and development speed they have from working on-site.
Buying individuals what they need is likely still cheaper than maintaining a large office space. Likely much cheaper.
> Working from home reduces the creativity of every employee not just because the existing tools for telecommute are insufficient to create a good work environment but also because it prevents people from socializing with spontaneity.
The tools are not insufficient, people's use of them are. The tools will allow you to do most anything you could in an office, management must facilitate processes to produce to desired output. If team creativity is the aim you can organize situations that maximize spontaneity and interaction.
I've not worked for a game studio so I certainly can't speak to the nuances therein, however the reasons you've given here for not working remote aren't compelling. People always give a host of reasons that ultimately boil down to a lack of proper process and management, which is needed in office just as much as out of office.
I'm not sure the stimulation of creativity can be improved much with process and management. Just like bouncing off ideas, brainstorms etc. works best in-person. Physical contact is something that is hard to replicate or work around with technology. Everyone has experienced the difference between webconferencing and real person meeting and can tell that one has more weight than the other. Maybe VR could be of use here since it helps lift that imaginary barrier that gives weight to conversations.
> Just like bouncing off ideas, brainstorms etc. works best in-person.
You seem set on this notion, but I very much disagree. Bouncing ideas and brainstorming can be just as productive remotely. In fact creativity can be stronger when your can more freely choose when to isolate yourself from other noise and when to socialize.
> Everyone has experienced the difference between webconferencing and real person meeting and can tell that one has more weight than the other.
You sure about everyone? I can tell you I personally think most in person meetings are unnecessary and distracting, and would've been better conferenced or even better not had at all. Even meetings that need to take place, I actually value in person less than conference, as it comes with various baggage of posturing and appearances.
This sounds like you just have a preference for in person, likely because it's just more comfortable for you from an interpersonal standpoint. And that's fine, but don't mistake that preference for blanket effectiveness measures for the rest of your team, company, or industry.
Dropbox is too[1] and what I like about this is that their main motive (I think, based on the kind of person I’ve seen Drew being) isn’t just not their employees getting sick, or it spreading inside Dropbox, but also to make their tiny contribution to it spreading less in the world in general. And in the article it mentions it’s only in Seattle that these other companies are instituting work from home, and it seems like it’s only because some of their employees are already infected! If everyone in the world that could would just work from home for a while and limit physical contact, then the trajectory of the spread would be much different and maybe we could nip it in the bud.
I work in a Japanese office of one of these companies and we have been able to work from home since January due to COVID-19 based on our own risk assessment, with advisories being sent via internal email.
So this article is wrong/misleading at least in that respect, probably because if is focused on the US.
I think for most companies the idea is they don't want entire teams getting sick (or worse) at the same time. It's nice to think there's a larger motive at play here, but I strongly believe self-interest is the primary factor. I also wouldn't be surprised if a lot of this is just SV monoculture at play (you'd hate to be the company that didn't do it and paid the price even if it was just bad press)
As an Italian Milan-based employee of one these corporations, I have been working from home for the last 2 weeks with personal plans to work from home at least until the end of March. I really appreciate the flexibility and feel extremely privileged to be able to do this. Unfortunately not everyone can or has the company infrastructure (e.g. laptops) to be able to work from home. I hope this shock snaps low-tech Italian SMEs into being more remote-friendly, and slowly indirectly improve the flexibility and work-life balance of employees. And of course, most hands-on jobs can't be done remotely, but most office jobs can.
The article is a bit out of date, it's not only Seattle. Facebook and Google announced tonight that all employees in the Bay Area can work from home. Microsoft/Linkedin announced all employees on the west coast can work from home.
This low number of confirmed cases combined with the high number of deaths, suggests there are hundreds of undiscovered cases still out there. Most countries seem to have a death rate closer to 2%, but in the US it appears to be a lot higher, which suggests many cases are not represented in these numbers. That, or it's become a lot more deadly. Neither is good.
You'll consistently see higher death rates and lower diagnosis rates in the US when compared to countries where healthcare isn't a massive financial burden.
Depends on what you mean by "totally". People cannot be "totally" controlled, but there's a lot of difference between how good of a handle various countries have on this.
I've worked remote very often and ive always felt that the current open plan offices are way too much of a distraction to get work done. This is the right change and remote working needs this change to happen despite the whining by the usual suspects of people sitting in office until late for no other reason than pleasing their bosses.
Hopefully, the focus will no move to tangible results being delivered than what dress you wear and how much time you spend at office.
This is a massive accidental experiment on the effectiveness of remote work in general.
A lot of entities (here in .it, besides companies: public administration workers and education workers) are turning to remote working, either willingly or unwillingly.
I really hope we'll all do a good retrospective after this emergency is solved and can finally challenge our own assumptions.
The way Germany is still allowing these music festivals (and football matches) to continue is what a 9-year old would do, to be honest, not the other way around. Granted, they're not alone in this, it seems like France has followed the same path. And why are you focusing your message only on Italy? Switzerland has adopted very similar measures (again, for very good reasons).
Italy may be overreacting, and at a huge cost to its economy. Yet, its better to overreact to things like this, than underreact. If anything, your country is the 9year old, not Italy.
Italy is if anything suffering from initially underreacting; they let the problem get far too large. At this point they din't have much choice; they've got a very serious problem.
When - pretty soon - intensive care units in most countries will be overwhelmed, and millions of (mostly elderly, granted) people will be left struggling for their life in their homes, we'll see who is acting like a 9yo.
I'm not expecting you to comply, I'm just stating what the risk is that those measures are trying to contain, and hoping this will help some readers understand.
By the way, given the mathematics of exponential virus spread and pretty much fixed number of ICUs per country, I also think that that scenario is pretty much a certainty at this point - but we can still lower the number of people who will be left without care by slowing down the contagion, and thus making the peak lower.
So it's OK to make even more people die? I'm sorry but Italy is not over-reacting, prevention is fundamental in an outbreak. Btw, I'm also from Italy, and I'm happy that all the concert/events that I had to go in February/March are cancelled, health first.
I am not paying a visit to my elderly relatives. Nor do I work in healthcare nor elderlycare. So the risk of me infecting a person from a risk-group is pretty non-existant. If someone in such a group is visiting a music festival, that is the risk they are taking.
Time will tell how much the overreacting will cost italys economy. It looks like it is going to be pretty bad. Tourism alone is going to cost big figure numbers.
Even if your life is dominated entirely by self-interest, and the interests of the rest of the population isn't important to you, don't you have any elderly relatives? Or friends with pre-existing conditions?
Speaking only for myself, I have elderly in-laws who I'd rather stick around, a wife with asthma and I know well two people on immunosuppressants. So I'm not taking this lightly at all.
I am not paying a visit to my elderly eelatives in the upcoming weeks and maybe months. So much I have already stated elsewhere. HOWEVER, the original question was how much people are concerned regarding this. And I stand with what I've said, I am not concerened about Coronavirus killing me.
And I think some western countries, like italy, are overreacting.
It'll be interesting to see if teams push for something closer to full remote wherever it worked well (or if some employees will want it, having not realized what it was like).
Plausibly teams that it works well for will have greater ammunition to push for it, since they have the past experience with it.