As someone who's worked from a lot and also worked from an office, I feel like there's an important component missing when discussing WFH for professions outside of tech.
One important issue IMO is just having a workspace. Software engineers are kinda spoiled in this regard because we make the big bucks. We can afford to retrofit areas of our homes to create good working conditions. We can take our laptops to coffee shops in a pinch.
I recently upgraded my living situation by moving into a much nicer place, but it's smaller so I ditched the "home office" setup I had before. Now with COVID I'm working in my dining room and on my couch. It's so much worse. It might sound silly but I'm putting a lot more wear/tear on my furniture by being around all day.
My take on this is that homes aren't and never were designed for WFH conditions. There are so many details about offices that we take for granted. I found myself having to clean way more often and do way more dishes now that the entire family is stuck in the house together.
Then there's a socialization aspect. Tech has a culture of "as long as you can do the job, it doesn't matter how you behave/dress/interact" -- this thinking is applied along a spectrum, some companies are more extreme than others about it. But a lot of professions like sales/legal/etc rely very heavily on close social interaction. Tech is also unique in this regard IMO.
I've always preferred working from home (couch, bed, or floor - I don't do tables and chairs) simply because programming was my hobby before it was my job, and I always associated peak productivity with being able to be relaxed and enjoy my surroundings rather than feel like I need to put on a physical performance of working.
My take on it is that people will adjust, and that the most productive environment is the one you're most familiar with. Many professions like sales, legal, and investment banking rely on putting on a professional "front" to make a good first impression. This is much harder to do when you're sitting on a couch at home and have a couple kids screaming in the background. IMHO this is a good thing, because the constant impression-management needed in these professions is a huge distraction from the actual substance of these jobs, and anything that punctures the impression-management bubble and forces people to deal with real human realities is an improvement. Already I'm seeing a big normalization of things like childcare, screaming toddlers, two-parent schedules, breastfeeding, and so on - this can't be shunted off as "woman's work" and relegated to the home anymore, when the home becomes the workplace and both parents generally need to trade off to make it work.
Basically I think our society before coronavirus was broken and coronavirus lockdowns are simply forcing us to deal with the ways in which it was broken. The old society isn't going to last much longer, and it's better to deal with that and build a more resilient, more honest one than to try to preserve the rituals that many industries had developed in 75 years of peace.
That is impressive; I could not possibly work like that though :<
1. Never mind posturing, it's the posture - I get back and neck pain just thinking of working from a couch or floor :(
2. I like my multiple 27" monitors. Going back to just a single 14" feels like a huge productivity hit.
3. Same thing with proper keyboard + mouse, vs just a touchpad or even the trackpoint.
So I'll agree that there's a lot of posturing and professional front in this and many professions; but even without that, I've always far far preferred my home office to either proper office, or working from living areas.
------------
The other aspects are more age dependent (though I believe so is the posture / back pain;). It helps to distinguish "working area" and "non-working area", triply so once you have family. There's a million things that I do better at when I'm "in the zone" - ingested the background, focused on the problem at hand. Distractions reset that counter - I love my kid, I love my wife, but there are aspects of my work that don't benefit from their presence :-). This is probably part of why my personal most productive times tended to be late at night when the world has settled down and distractions are at a minimum...
This is a problem I have too. I don’t have a home office so I have to work from the couch hunched over my laptop. It hurts. I’ve been doing it for a month. I get tingles in my pinkie after a couple hours they last for the day (ulnar nerve compression I think)
I don’t know how to cope. I can’t take the time off and not work for another month, but I also don’t want to wear my body down and have pain all day every day. I hated working in my office because it’s open space and noisy but I’d love to go now that it’s deserted. I have two large displays there, a mouse, a keyboard.
Most people have a completely incorrect angle between keyboard, wrist and arm. Working from couch typically increases this angle even further. You should see a significant improvement if you reduce that angle. Basically, you don't want your hand to be going "up" at the wrist. Inasmuch as possible strive to have your hand flat through the wrist, or even fall down slightly.
If you don't have room for a mouse, get a trackball. They're relatively cheap and not having expensive health issues is worth it.
Be inventive in changing up the posture. If you genuinely don't have any other surface (dining room table, kitchen counter etc), switch it up - put laptop on couch and sit on the floor. Sit on couch with laptop on your knees, lie down with laptop on your lap or chest, put the laptop on window sill or fridge or counter or shelf and work standing, etc. NONE of these are ideal, but changing is important.
It sounds like you have trigger points building up. Stretch your arms, shoulders, and back everyday. I recommend arm stretches for doing handstands. Also, make sure your arms and upper body are warm, borderline hot. I wear winter cycling sleeves because they are thin and don’t get in the way. Also wear a thin smartwool sweater, and the heat is on 76. Completely reversed the pain and discomfort I had been experiencing for years by doing the above daily.
Unless you are super cash strapped you can get a second monitor, mouse and keyboard + some basic chair and desk for I'm guessing 300$ if you are resourceful. Buying used is risky now otherwise you could probably get even cheaper
Even if you can't afford to buy those, I'm sure you could talk to your manager/company and ask to borrow the ones you use in the office till you are able to go back to work. In a situation like this, I think they'll understand.
Mine do, and it doesn't help. I only have 1 desk in my apartment where 2 27" monitors can be placed and it's my personal desk. So now I'm working from my wife's desk that she doesn't use right now (and I can restore it easily), it has space for 1 monitor + laptop. It's not perfect, but I'm not complaining. And I am indeed lucky to even have 2 desks in 70m2 apartment and a dedicated office. (No kids).
I'm very happy for you that you can work like that, but if I work in a bad posture like on a couch for an hour I will have back pain the rest of the day. Do it for a full working days and I will have pain for a week. I have always been prone to it but many more of my colleagues are developing similar problems after working from home for a few weeks without good setups.
I move a lot. My posture in general is terrible. I'm slouched in the corner of a couch right now, with my laptop on a half-lap, and when I worked in an office I would usually drape myself over the back of a high-backed chair and kneel on it. However, I don't stay in any one position for longer than about 15 minutes - after that I stand up, or shift to a different position, or swivel the chair around, or go lie down. Never had back pain or other joint problems other than tendonitis in my fingers. I've found that moving around and standing up every 15 minutes or so outweighs all the other shitty stuff I do to my body. Humans weren't made to sit still.
Funny thing, working from home finally let me get a standing desk where it felt too conspicuous at the office. I don't have as much space in my living room any more, but I feel much better when that afternoon slump usually hits.
How do you track the logic of an async call that sends shit across five different files in this n-tier architecture webapp and see the app update in real time and see what your coworkers are saying???
Also,
>The old society isn't going to last much longer,
I seriously hope you're right. I'm cynical to how sweeping or durable the changes that corona catalyzed will be, but I can hope.
Because most office workers outside of hardcore techies have no need for full-on computers at home since they can have most of their on-line needs met on mobile devices which can be used one handed on the couch, bed, kitchen, etc. so it makes no sense for them in investing in furniture and peripherals that will stay unused.
>Basically I think our society before coronavirus was broken and coronavirus lockdowns are simply forcing us to deal with the ways in which it was broken. The old society isn't going to last much longer, and it's better to deal with that and build a more resilient, more honest one than to try to preserve the [old] rituals
I think this point is much broader and meatier than the rest of the discussion, and will be the defining cultural consensus coming out of this whole mess. The virus seems to have a peculiar way of highlighting our sins in a grimly ironic, almost poetic way.
This is actually a bad example, in that "cloud, bed, floor" aren't really productive environments for most people.
That said, I also disagree with the parent poster. Yes, there are things we take for granted , but with a little thought we can replicate the surroundings at home too.
Of course, if you are productive only when surrounded when people who are always talking, that's a different story. In my office, everyone around me in open cubicles is always on a call with someone. Some personal, some team mates in a different geo. The only time I do real work is when I take WFH
> Software engineers are kinda spoiled in this regard because we make the big bucks.
But that's true of offices as well. Do you think the average administrative assistant is working on Aeron chairs? No, they're working on cheap chairs and cheap desks. In fact, so did I, despite being a developer - I just didn't work at a fancy company. At least at home we have the option of spending a bit more, even if it comes out of our paycheck.
> homes aren't and never were designed for WFH conditions.
They were, in the past. Houses built for the gentry used to have a room called "the study", a quiet space equipped with bookshelves and a desk. This went out of fashion as most men, and later women, began to go to this newfangled place called "the office" that was outside of their homes.
IMO most American detached homes are large enough for a dedicated working room to be retrofitted in. This may not be possible for small homes and apartments in urban areas, though, as they were designed long after the study became obsolete.
> But a lot of professions like sales/legal/etc rely very heavily on close social interaction.
That culture will be seriously disrupted if Coronavirus isn't under control soon, or if similar outbreaks occur regularly in the future. There's already huge selection pressure against companies that can't be productive in WFH mode. Sooner or later, the ability to switch to WFH on a moment's notice and maintain productivity might be considered a great strength in the eyes of investors and customers alike.
Sure you're having a not so great time, and your using your furniture more, but you can still do your job. So this is an orthogonal issue.
I live in a small place and we're going to buy a folding desk and a chair, it takes almost no space and you can fold it when you're done. It's less than 100 bucks. It's up to you to creat these conditions.
Also not all offices have nice desks, chairs, environment, etc. I use to work in a place without windows.
You got space limitations because you moved to a smaller flat. Office furniture is never a problem. You can make a table from IKEA (4 legs and the tabletop) can cost as low as £50 and if you pick them special legs you can make it a standing desk with the same cost. The only thing you can't cut corners on is the chair, a bad chair will ruin your health.
And for all of us who appreciate the things we can do with IKEA stuff (without spending 5 salaries on it), I believe it's worth mentioning the IKEA Hackers (https://www.ikeahackers.net/). Those folks are doing some crazy/interesting stuff.
Agreed, my wife and I rent a nice but small 1bdrm apartment in the East Bay, we are both scientists/engineers (not software) and were not primarily working from home so having office space for both of us wasn't a prioirty when apartment hunting. Now that we are both full time WFH its pretty busy. I've got a desk in the living room and my wife is on a folding table in the bedroom or the dining room table. Its been nice out so I'll have meetings from the back patio as well. Making due but I miss my desk in the office and my bike commute.
You need
1. Dedicated room
2. Good setup - monitor, standing desk, ergonomic chair
I wfh and yeah there are times when I will work from the backyard in the summer, or by the pool, or from the living room with the TV on when am super bored. But the majority of the work is done from the home office.
We are looking to buy a new house soon and have made room for a home office a priority due to the current virus. Both my wife and I are working in our small apartment now while our 3 year old yells outside our second bedroom with grandma chasing after him. Ya...no, this isn't working.
> Our classification implies that 34 percent of U.S. jobs can plausibly be performed at home.
If even 25% of jobs could be made remote, that would be huge. The reduction in automobile traffic, the improved happiness of workers(who want to work remote), as well as parents being around more for their kids, would benefit society overall.
>I have a feeling that a low double-digit percent of jobs will permanently convert to remote or partial remote after this experience.
I am hesitant to draw too many conclusions from this work at home experience because the pandemic is providing so many complicating factors that end up distorting both the benefits and downsides of working from home. Some examples to mind:
* It often is a benefit to get out of a distracting office, but now people are at home being distracted by kids who would otherwise be in school under normal circumstances.
* Work from home allows people the freedom to work form wherever they want. Now we are all stuck at home.
* Every company is being forced to be a remote-first organization so there is no face to face communication happening in the office that someone working from home might miss.
* The pandemic takes a mental toll on everyone. Many of us are probably not as productive right now as we would be otherwise and that has nothing to do with working form home, but will that decreased productivity be blamed on working from home?
I was thinking about this the other day, and came to a similar conclusion.
I've been working fully remote for 18 months now, and the last few weeks have been unusual and more isolating than normal due to everything being closed. No coffee shops, no library, no working lunches, etc.
I suppose it's a smaller jump for me than most people, so I'm not complaining, but it's definitely a misrepresentation of WFH.
So all these cons will disappear after the pandemic, so it will be even easier to negotiate WFH. "Look I was 90% productive during the pandemic, but that was because of the kids, now I will be 105% productive."
Anecdote is not data, but I am realizing that I can be more productive at home than I guessed. Also I think my bosses are going to be more comfortable with me working from home after this.
However, there is still so much knowledge / creative work that is best done face to face. What I can see happening in my work place is more people might take work at home days. There is no way we will want to keep taking important meetings on Zoom.
I'm with your second part. The technical aspects of my job are incredibly easy working from home. The time is incredibly productive (except when I'm on HN dicking around).
But what does suffer are all of the creative processes. Zoom meetings are not the same as real-person meetings. The cadence and flow is off, and it interrupts the creative processes. Maybe that will get better over time, now that we have a whole month to get used to it, but I doubt it.
I'm with you, I look for all of my salaried folks to have the opportunity to take work from home days occasionally. Honestly, I've been pushing that for years, so I'll count it as a win.
Yes, I imagine the ad-hoc creative process does get thrown off when transitioning from in-office to remote. As a remote worker for the past 3 years, that’s been involved in creative engineering discussions, it’s on the individuals and the company as a whole to be intentional about the creative process.
My company was ~50% remote across the US and adjoining countries before, and now we’re 100% remote and the transition has been relatively seamless.
Some things that help:
1) Over-communicate. Don’t be afraid to sound stupid or think that your ideas have to be fully baked. Share early and often. Whether that’s a message, a doc, an idea, anything. Blast it out and organic conversations will usually flow from there.
2) Foster a culture of popping open a video chat when there seems to be a misunderstanding after two back-and-forths. This comes from Gitlab’s principles, I forget the actual wording, but the spirit of the principle has helped me numerous times from having long, dragged out conversations through text when a simple 3min video chat will resolve the issue. Integrating your video conference solution with your chat client works wonders here. We have Slack+Zoom so a video chat is a simple text command away.
3) Establish some loose SLAs for communication like “will respond to comments within X period of time.” (Be as detailed as you like.) But let people know when they can expect a response from you generally based upon the medium.
4) With the above, embrace a RFC (request-for-comments) culture where people can give feedback and have organic conversations on anything WIP. And then follow-up with a scheduled 30min meeting to resolve any outstanding ambiguities.
There are probably a few other things I’m forgetting, but the above has served myself and our company so well that I honestly feel more productive working remotely than in an office. The meetings are shorter and more focused, there’s more documentation, and there’s less shoot-the-breeze interruptions.
All the above isn’t to say there isn’t merit to working in an office. There absolutely is! Just that I think it’s normal to have some growing pains when transitioning to remote work, and I hope that people won’t write it off entirely before giving some amount of intentional thought to learning, adapting, and building an equally productive remote workflow.
The popup video is similiar to the popup person standing in front of my desk. Put it in an email/slack message and schedule meetings ahead of time to give other a scheduled period of time that other work isn't being performed while you want to discuss something else.
It starts with an async slack conversation. 90% of conversations go well and end with a shared understanding without much back-and-forth. Done.
For the odd 10% of conversations where you've gone back-and-forth a couple times, you ask the person whether they're available for a videochat. They either say yes, at which point you join a 3-5min videochat, or no they'd prefer to put a time on the calendar.
I agree on the creative process, but I think improvements in technology can get us there.
First, I think all companies that do a lot of technical calls right now should provide their employees with iPad pro. The drawing feature is just so good that it replaces any whiteboarding.
>First, I think all companies that do a lot of technical calls right now should provide their employees with iPad pro. The drawing feature is just so good that it replaces any whiteboarding.
lol, as if our company's bean counters that bought us the cheapest, crappyest Lenovo laptops they could find are suddenly gonna justify shelling out the cash for iPad Pros for everyone. That's a good one, thanks for the laugh.
What I can see happening in my work place is more people might take work at home days.
My employer has been going this direction for almost 20 years. It started with allowing remote employees before I started 18 years ago. Then a merger with another company 7 years ago forced everybody to adopt good "remote" meeting practices. And since then, people have been a lot more comfortable working remotely, part-time or full-time. If 100% of meetings have at least 1 remote, it's a lot less stressful to be remote yourself.
The company I work for already is fully remote, but I heard from a colleague that their company, which was previously hesitant towards remote work, has seen a productivity increase after having been forced to do remote, and now plans to allow 100% remote work after lockdowns are lifted.
==I heard from a colleague that their company, which was previously hesitant towards remote work, has seen a productivity increase after having been forced to do remote==
Could also be that employees, as a whole, are more worried about losing jobs in this environment and are producing more to protect themselves.
Convenience is now only a minor part of it. Being a remote company provides crucial insurance. Even part of the company being remote will allow some operations to continue uninterrupted at a time like this.
You are correct about the dogs and I do not understand why, can you explain?
There are countless newspaper articles about how all the animal shelters have had all their dogs adopted out in the last two weeks, for the first time ever. Is it single people wanting a companion while they work from home?
I've had a lot of dogs, and dog ownership isn't a new thing to me. That said, the last dog I got was during a break between jobs that I ended up extending. I watched videos on Youtube to train her with (Thanks, Zak George) and worked with her in ways that I've never done with another pet and wow, this is easily the best dog I've ever had.
The very early bits were the usual stuff. Kennel training is sad, so I made it a little easier by sleeping on a palette next to the kennel, with my hand through the cage for contact. Two or three nights of that, and I've never had another kennel problem again. Teaching a dog to sit (the right way) takes about 5 minutes if you do it right, and another couple of weeks of periodic reinforcement. Teaching a dog to sit when she's excited you just got home? That takes longer.
I'm rambling, but the point I was trying to get to is that I won't ever get another dog again unless I have at least a couple of months to devote to that initial training. Forming that bond, building those habits, it's made me realize how much of a disservice I've done to every other dog I've ever had that I've gotten and then left to go to work.
For the folks who've adopted new dogs in this, I almost hope that we're self-sequestered for long enough that their dogs get better than what I've historically given mine, but either way, a well trained pup can brighten every day they're around, and I'm happy to see the trend of what I hope is responsible pet adoption.
It could be just that simple. I wonder too if there's pent-up demand. I think it's best when bringing a dog into a new home if you can be around a lot to help them learn the ropes. I guess that goes double for a puppy, but I think it applies to mature dogs too. If other folks think the same way, this might be a good opportunity for them to do something they'd been putting off.
In some places like Spain, "walking the dog" is the only valid excuse to go for a walk at all. (Strange how it's acceptable to deprive humans of exercise, but inhumane to deprive dogs!)
The process of homeschooling now with kids who are used to public school and parents who had no time to prepare for it is not really good data about the process of homeschooling kids who have had time to get used to it as a parent who has had time to prepare.
Maybe, but once you get past the hump of "Oh my god what am I doing?" It's a much better system overall. Same thing with work from home. Covid is a bad thing obviously, but it may end up being a good thing for the American worker and American family, bringing about a rise in homeschooling, as well as rise in work from home, resulting in more cohesive families in which parents are actually able to take an active hand in the raising of children, rather than delegating it to schools and daycares.
I'm not talking about homeschooling. If parents are around their kids for 2 more hours out of a day, that's a positive thing. It's not inconsequential.
All remote work is not created equal. I think an aspect of remote work being a more seamless/smoother transition is for the distributed team to be in the same time zone or have less than 1 hour time difference. At my current company, we have conference calls between SF-Portland without much change in work/life. We evan have virtual lunches together.
I recall having to do SF-Asia and even SF-Dallas and SF-Europe calls in my previous job and I was burnt out real quick. Just trying to plan a meeting that wasn't already a recurring scheduled meeting took about 2 days.
[EDIT] Based on the initial responses I changed it from the same time zone being a key aspect to an aspect which makes the transition seamless/smoother.
I work across 12+ hour time differentials quite often. The real keys are independence, trust and working on projects where touching bases weekly or so makes sense - and otherwise operating over email.
(that last is the biggest key really).
I'm a software developer and the teams mostly coordinate over code feedback and ticket requests anyway.
Yes I can definitely see it working super seamlessly for something like GitHub/Gitlabs and other tools that are for SW developers built by SW developers.
I feel like for stuff with UX or stuff that requires significant collaboration that can't be done via git comments, someone needs to take the hit to be up at odd hours for real-time discussion meetings via Zoom/Skype or make other such work-style adaptations.
I'm pretty much full stack - UX work is typically "post a prototype or sketch or plan, wait for feedback". I think this works better when one has strongly structured design protocols though.
I've worked through a lot of different fields getting to where I am now - for instance, warehouse inventory and paperwork handling raises the importance of accurate warehouse inventories (and they weren't low before) - but a lot of the paperwork could easily be done remotely these days. (sometimes I miss forklift driving - it was a lot less stressful than programming in many ways, although it required a much more immediate care and caution and physically higher risk)
I suspect that crosses a lot of other varieties of work - paperwork could be more offloaded or moved digital, while the key actions still require people, mostly.
And someone always has to maintain the infrastructure.
I'm not sure it really is a key aspect, maybe it is a risk. With such a small time difference you can continue - for the most part - as you did before. But there's always the question if what you did before was really a good idea or just "we always did it that way", e.g. many conference calls probably could (and should?) be replaced by written text, which isn't as ephemeral and can be worked on asynchronously.
That is a change at first, but not more of a change than going from a very small company, where everyone talks to everyone and maybe even sits in the same office, to a bigger one where you have to establish processes to ensure information still reaches everyone in the company (if it needs to).
Agreed! Its not a key aspect, its just an aspect which makes the transition more seamless/smoother. Made a brief update to my initial comment. For people can for sure adapt to remote work across various timezones.
> I think a key aspect of remote work being successful is for the distributed team to be in the same time zone or have less than 1 hour time difference
I think the exact time difference doesn't matter so much as everyone can be at work simultaneously at least 70/80% of the time.
It really depends on how much close real-time collaboration is actually needed in your job. For some jobs/companies that may be high, for others where the work is done more independently, that may not be an issue.
I've done a fair bit of remote contracting from Asia working with team members in the U.S. and Europe and haven't had many issues since we're mostly working independently. Actually I'm currently in Japan/Korea working with NYC - probably the most inconvenient timezone difference (9am-5pm EST -> 10pm-6am Korea), but for my current project it's not really that bad since we're mostly independent and I'm a night owl anyways (also we have developers in Europe and India where the time difference isn't as drastic).
I'm not claiming that timezone is completely irrelevant because it does make a difference, but I think the bigger factor is the individual. I've had more difficulty getting in touch with team members in the same timezone than other team members in opposite timezones. In my experience, corporate culture overvalues the importance of being immediately available (not surprising given their open embrace of open offices and reluctance to adopting remote work) and underestimates the disruption and the productivity of deep, focused, uninterrupted work (eg. see Cal Newport).
We all have our individual work preferences. Regardless of what anyone's individual preferences are, I hope we see a trend towards greater freedom of choice in enabling workers to work how they are most comfortable.
I work with colleagues in Hawaii all the time, and my office is on the east coast. There are days when it really clicks and Hawaii folks can pickup right where I left off when I go home and the company gets like a 14 hour work day. But for sure there are other days when I need something from someone that hasn't waken up yet, let alone gotten into the office. Every situation can work with patience and communication.
How would being in an office change that? The time zone differences are a real factor in any global company, regardless of whether you are sitting in an office or in your home.
Agreed - SF-NY can work and many companies are doing it. Its more if a CEO/founder is finding sites for a second remote office from scratch all things being equal, SF-Seattle/Portland/LA or even SF-Reno/Sacramento/Santa Cruz/San Diego/Phoenix (if more cost of living arbitrage is desired) will be easier than SF/NY.
- Impromptu virtual meetings do not need an additional 1-3 hour buffer at the beginning/end of the day to avoid disrupting the majority of people's daily work patterns.
- In person visits can likely be done by driving versus flying. An if flying - a day trip can suffice.
Many people have brought this up, but there are definitely things to consider for a job to be done while working from home:
1) worker productivity (does it go up or down for all of these professions)
2) do companies want to pay you as much if you work from home?
3) is it sustainable for large swathes of people vs. small groups of people who self-select to like this work-style
4) will people abuse the system such that it ruins it for everybody else
I can see a far more likely implementation of this would be a mixed case -- "work from home wednesdays" or something like that.. not friday or monday because then basically people would assume there is a certain amount of abuse of people working for 1 hour on Friday then starting their weekend early..
> 4) will people abuse the system such that it ruins it for everybody else
> I can see a far more likely implementation of this would be a mixed case -- "work from home wednesdays" or something like that.. not friday or monday because then basically people would assume there is a certain amount of abuse of people working for 1 hour on Friday then starting their weekend early..
This is a pretty fake concern in my experience driven by butts-in-seats culture. I'm gonna take hours off and work when I feel like it when working remotely. If that means working 8 hours, sure. If it means I don't do any work on a Tuesday, who cares? All that matters is if I'm delivering what is expected of me (e.g. my spring tickets) and available for communication. If I spend 4 hours a day working & 4 hours studying & playing mahjong online, what's it to you, you know?
>If it means I don't do any work on a Tuesday, who cares? All that matters is if I'm delivering what is expected of me (e.g. my spring tickets) and available for communication. If I spend 4 hours a day working & 4 hours studying & playing mahjong online, what's it to you, you know?
Enlightened employers realize this. It's not super common in the industry yet, but if you can find an employer who doesn't track your productivity by seeing how many meetings you attend and how often you're sitting at your desk alt-tabbing between VS Code and Github to look productive, you've hit the jackpot.
Success should (ideally) be measured by value-add to the company, and dependability of the employee. Not many employers/managers know how to track value-add though. For a non-tech-savvy manager to measure the success of an engineer is difficult. They might look at your code commit and see that you removed 400 lines of code and added 20 and think of this as a "negative" impact because the numbers don't look nice. It's a frustrating aspect of the industry, but possible to work around if you work with decent people.
The relationship you're describing is contracting. Salaried employees don't have a pre-negotiated scope of work; "what's expected of you" isn't fixed in advance. This cuts both ways. If something runs late, you don't take a financial loss. But if something runs early, you don't get the time back either. The company has purchased everything you can get done in a workday. If that's more than average, it's more than average.
> The relationship you're describing is contracting.
The relationship I'm describing is actually at-will employment. I have quite a bit of freedom to do whatever I want with my time so long as my employer is still willing to pay me. I have no obligation to operate at my personal 100% unless my employer demands it (in times of need, it can be the case. But that's rare!)
I have found it easier to work a full day on Friday when I'm at home, because people aren't gathering in the kitchen pouring beer and making cocktails at 4pm.
(I'd love that if I started working at 7am like some of my coworkers, but when I start at 9:30am, the day feels a little truncated.)
yea I think the reason its worth mentioning is that when you talk about a report that will claim that 30%+ of jobs could be done from home, then the question is how many of those jobs can be setup in a way where it can be measured in a way that doesn't switch from "butts in seats at the office" to "keep your webcam on all the time or you are fired".. certain jobs may have the right combination of "not very fun to do" and "hard to measure output".. so as a result the default state for people would be to likely trend toward lower productivity without somebody minding them. So the helpful metric to add to these 30+% of jobs that could be done from home would be how likely they can be done without a manager that either pushes people to perform in some way or requires assistance on a regular basis to more junior employees to keep their productivity and learning curve moving.
I feel you, and you are likely right for software, but for any business that e.g. needs to do things when markets (or other businesses) are open, this will never be the case in practice.
> Is there anyone out there with a good argument for why remote workers should be paid less?
Right now people working in cities with a high cost of living have a large salary to make up for their living costs. When you make a job remote you suddenly increase the pool of possible employees to anyone in the world, including people living in places that may have a lower cost of living. Those people will be happy to work for less.
If you have a remote employee, why pay them 200k to live in SF if you can pay someone in India 50k?
On one hand, if you are worth $N to the company sitting in an office and produce the same output working from home, that output is still worth >$N to the company.
On the other hand, if the company isn't limited by geographic restrictions, it can find people who may produce an equivalent output and are willing to work for less.
So it is a balance between how in demand your skills are and how competitive the market is for those skills. In my opinion, if a company is in need of an employee and is willing to pay $N for the employee, simply being remote should not reduce that amount. It has advantages for all parties involved (improved employee satisfaction, lower office overhead, etc).
Ultimately it is a negotiation, the the company can try to justify paying you less because of cost of living adjustments unless you can negotiate otherwise. It's in their interest to get your labor for the best price possible.
Assuming equal value created, companies should pay remote workers more: normal pay + savings from not using office related overhead (rent + equipment + amenities)
Compensation isn't just about value created, though. Costs, remote versus local efficiencies (cannot be assumed to be identical), and a given person's other options also enter into the negotiations.
The argument also goes the other way. The company pays you now for the work in the office and for the inconvenience you incur from commuting. No more commuting, so you should get paid less.
The company isn't paying for your time in the car but it is paying for the space your desk in the office occupies. Would you argue that someone who drives 30 minutes more to the office than an otherwise equivalent coworker should be paid more?
It's possible, isn't it? The person with the longer commute may be able to use it to negotiate for a higher salary. Particularly if they have another option with a shorter commute.
Perhaps I misunderstand you or have overlooked something.
If everyone switches to pay for outcome instead of paying for hours then they will pay the same or even better. Where better comes from I could do it in 1 hour and other 3 hours I was able to do whatever else.
Though not everyone likes that because there is a lot of people who benefit from hourly based pay. They don't do much but they put their hours in.
The second part is also quantifying outcome is hard... Should we pay that guy that fixed the machine in 5 minutes the same as if we would spend a week to fix it ourselves? Maybe we would fix it in one week instead? Should we spend one week trying to fix it and then call that guy ... or we would break the machine so the guy would charge us 5x more? Then you get all companies charging a lot more if someone tries to fix something on their own because they usually mess up.
Lower expenses for the employer as well by not having to maintain a physical office, which I have to imagine is a greater per-employee saving for the company than commuting is for the individual.
Look, I am just gonna say it a certain way: It is better now but there were long stretches in my life where the only in person human interaction I had was at work or at stores(until delivery apps became a thing) would have sucked big time if I did wfh then.
I also did wfh doing call support and now IT/infosec stuff. Night and day!
Team dynamics: not everyone can develop interpersonal relationships well when wfh compared do in person. Imagine being the new guy and have a million questions but your personality forces you to evaluate body language and greetings in person before you are comfortable approaching someone.
Oh, and.. Some people have terrible home situation. I don't mean just kids but sick people to care for, abusive people living with them,loud roommates,etc ....
WFH being the norm would suck,but companies should be much more accomodating these days.
Head mounted displays that were immersive as a motorcycle helmet with headphones could suddenly move from being a luxury product to a substitute for a private space for an office in apartments with families.
If I were in the business, I'd be re-marketing HMDs as a work from home privacy solution. What makes something mass market is it serves people and solves a problem for them, not something that's just entertaining.
I'm a little confused by their definition of "jobs" here. Is this the absolute number of jobs? Or the types of jobs available? Looking at the article, they use wages to get a more firm grasp on this (saying something like 44% of wages could be made from home). If that's the case, what does that statistic say for the unemployment rate in the US, should social-distancing remain long term? Are we going to see >50% unemployment??
I was also unclear about whether they mean "How many workers in the US could work from home", or whether "How many job categories can work from home".
But they state "To answer these questions, we classify the feasibility of working at home for all occupations
and merge this classi cation with occupational employment counts for the United States."
So it looks like they're counting number of workers.
A large number of the remaining 56% are classified as "essential": grocery and certain retail, public servants and first responders, healthcare, education, automotive services, etc. In Houston, for example, many of the energy sector jobs are classified as essential. Stay at home orders don't impact those jobs (though many of them may be operating at partial capacity)
> A large number of the remaining 56% are classified as "essential": grocery and certain retail, public servants and first responders, healthcare, education [...]
The authors already code 82% of teachers as able to work from home, albeit with difficulty. See the second footnote in the paper.
That's not just working from home if so, that's reassigning an industry from face to face to virtual, and if history is any guide a lot of teachers may lose their jobs as well as secondary jobs becoming lost too. Sort of a pyrrhic victory.
> If that's the case, what does that statistic say for the unemployment rate in the US, should social-distancing remain long term? Are we going to see >50% unemployment??
Highly unlikely. The government will abandon social distancing long before tolerating a long-term 50+% unemployment rate.
You will see there is a lot more than can be done from home than people realize. Obviously it doesn't all translate over, there's a lot more machinery now.
But if people had to work from home, people would get creative and there's more that could be done.
> most jobs in finance, corporate management, and professional and scientific services could plausibly be performed at home
Or some of this could simply not be done at all.
> very few jobs in agriculture, hotels and restaurants, or retail
Au contraire, all agriculture work can be done at home when we raise our own food. All teaching can also be done at home and currently is being done so. The basic need of a hotel, a place to sleep, and restauranting, of preparing and serving food, can be done at home. And retail is already done at home, store clerks are largely obsolete. What can't be done at home yet is delivery services and most manufacturing in its current state, but manufacturing probably could be done at home through expanding micromanufacturing. Networks of craftsmen shops running mini production lines can make a lot of things.
I stopped going into the office a decade ago to be a home dad. I raised 3 kids at home while doing home duties and casual web dev and server support. It is very isolating and I think a lot of people are going to struggle with it. I have always been socially awkward, I didn't grow up with siblings and have always been comfortable with silence and something to read. But even I struggled a bit. I think most people should make extra time to keep in touch with colleagues and do video meetups and fun stuff with them. It might be disruptive to work and some people might want to do something else instead but I think the effort probably needs to be made.
If you stare at a computer all day, ie. you have an office job, your job can be done from home.
I really hope remote work becomes more accepted as an option. It's not even just about individual productivity and happiness, it's better for the environment.
What annoys me on these threads is when I see people say "I don't like WFH, therefore other people shouldn't be able to WFH". There's nothing wrong with preferring to go into the office, but who gives you the right to tell others how they have to work? Everyone should have the freedom to work how they are most comfortable, so long as they can get the work done.
> "I don't like WFH, therefore other people shouldn't be able to WFH".
Could you point me to an example of this, because I dont think I've ever seen this. The opposite, however I've seen pretty commonly where since "I like WFH so everyone should WFH".
That's because the set of possible vocations is only bounded by human imagination. This results in an uncountable set, which would resolve to a value that approaches infinity.
A more insightful question is, "How many of the jobs that people hold today can be done at home?" 34% seems like a reasonable metric.
I'd argue that a large majority of people who have "work from home" computer jobs either already have a computer that they can use for work, or their employer does. Or it can be purchased from already existing inventory (used or new).
Also, a computer purchase for an employee isn't usually a frequent occurrence. Maybe once during hire, and once a year to stay up to date (if that).
Computer manufacturers can probably take a break for a couple of months and the tech industry will survive.
It's naive to think the whole world can just "work from home" indefinitely. Everything's interconnected, and the vast majority of jobs are still jobs that can't be done without humans labouring in meatspace. If you want to pretend the US is some magic island that doesn't depend on China, go for it.
Wow, that's scary. I expect these disruptions to continue for eighteen months. If a developer can't get a replacement computer, what good is our home office then?
Agreed, but my point is that the numbers from the report only include US jobs, but they ignore the fact that we have a global economy. Most consumer goods are produced outside the US, and the US also imports a lot of its food (from Mexico, for example).
One important issue IMO is just having a workspace. Software engineers are kinda spoiled in this regard because we make the big bucks. We can afford to retrofit areas of our homes to create good working conditions. We can take our laptops to coffee shops in a pinch.
I recently upgraded my living situation by moving into a much nicer place, but it's smaller so I ditched the "home office" setup I had before. Now with COVID I'm working in my dining room and on my couch. It's so much worse. It might sound silly but I'm putting a lot more wear/tear on my furniture by being around all day.
My take on this is that homes aren't and never were designed for WFH conditions. There are so many details about offices that we take for granted. I found myself having to clean way more often and do way more dishes now that the entire family is stuck in the house together.
Then there's a socialization aspect. Tech has a culture of "as long as you can do the job, it doesn't matter how you behave/dress/interact" -- this thinking is applied along a spectrum, some companies are more extreme than others about it. But a lot of professions like sales/legal/etc rely very heavily on close social interaction. Tech is also unique in this regard IMO.