1. Alibaba's teamwork app, Dingtalk, crashed around 9AM due to too many concurrent video conference saturate the server and bandwitdh
2. Tencent's for enterprise messaging app, Wechat for Business, crashed. Connection is extremely unstable
3. Baidu's office VPN was busy and employees are asked to stay disconnected to leave bandwith for sysadmins
4. Huawei's WeLink was unavailable for a while
5. Bytedance (company behind TikTok)'s Lark, an online office suite like GApps was the biggest winner, only had some minor issues.
6. Zoom offered a free version to mainland users and it's extremely popular. But it lacks non-video-conf features. e.g. simple daily poll to see if your colleagues were healthy or not.
I've created a temp account for this to be on the safe side :)
I work for a big (300k+ ) company with some tens of thousand office workers in CN
We are preparing since about 2 weeks to upgrade our remote access infra in China with partial success as something which would be a soft upgrade everywhere else needs to go through various levels of local subcontractors and partners of our provider
On top of that because of the Internet situation in CN it is not practically easy to use remote access via another location with higher capacity - the performance gets degraded very quickly - or use resources directly over the internet eg. RTC which is not hosted locally
I doubt that local authorities will change something in the future because of this example but one can only hope
This "experiment" will set a new baseline on which management can act with the goal to satisfy such use cases and grant the necessary resources to implement them.
Well the clock is ticking for non-Chinese companies. When SARS struck in 2003, it took about four months for the total global number of cases to crest. Assuming the same sort of pattern here with the same WFH response, we will see peak VPN/remote usage in April/May.
That's good to hear. Especially that last point: zoom has been repeatedly blocked by China. It would be interesting to see if they could keep those users
My wife is a high-school teacher in Shenzhen and her school has suspended physical attendance thru Feb 17th, possibly to be extended until the start of March. However, they are requiring teachers and students to work full-time from home using online assignments and communications channels. It struck me that this is indeed a huge experiment in remote working, even for professions that don't typically have that option at all whatsoever (i.e. school teachers).
They have that option in the US, just not with public schools. I’ve been told that even public schools work that way in Australia under normal conditions.
Most people can’t work from home because of local tradition not because it doesn’t work.
I've heard from relatives that it is the same thing in Hong Kong. Last time I talked to them they said it has been quite difficult so far. I'm not sure if they have had any training to prepare for this at all or if they are just winging it.
Lack of space at home might also be an issue. Hong Kong flats can be pretty small.
Many homes aren’t really suited to WFH, especially regular WFH. They might be noisy during the day, lack space, lack decent network connections, etc...you also can’t really WFH from a quiet public space like a library (not that HK really has those).
Schools in Singapore are regularly required to practice the so-called "e-learning" every semester/quarter. It's quite common for richer Asian countries that had been through SARS to think of these contingency plans.
Also it was nothing fancy. Just recorded video lectures, and an online forum.
they're about to start experimenting with Zoom, which should be super interesting especially with primary/middle school students. a lot of the teachers are quite unhappy about it
I am currently soft-quarantined by my employer in Hong Kong because I recently visited Mainland China, and will be working from home for 14 days, along with many others.
It's not going that well: from my subjective point of view, people seem to treat it as an extra vacation. They are often not online and will only complete a few small tasks per day, because there is no threat from the boss who sees that you are browsing facebook instead of working.
Even government employees are at home. Many people didn't get their tax bill so they don't need to pay tax for now. Sweet!
That experiment makes me think that perhaps work from home is optimal mostly for a small pool of highly motivated and talented individuals, such as the average person on HN who actually does feel more productive working from home. Outside of HN, work ethic could be different.
Well, of course you can't just switch to remote work overnight without any preparation, and expect everything to work well immediately! But, for example: how do you know those workers are treating it as a small vacation? You're not there to see them either! Managers can do the same, they don't need to know what the worker is doing instead of working; they can see the work is not getting done.
I would guess a lot are also not set up at home to work efficiently. I.e. proper desk in a quiet room etc. And if the kids are home from school as well, I assume it is very hard to concentrate on working from home.
Also if there is the threat of an incoming pandemic, then my priorities would be elsewhere than work. I.e. securing family, provisions, medicines, etc. And checking news sources about the epidemic every 5 minutes is not good for efficiency...
For most modern work it's difficult to see if the work is being done, whether people are at home or in the office. For the stuff you can watch it's mostly impossible to do at home.
There is one major requirement for remote work, it’s called deadlines. Give people a paycheck, some requirements, and deadlines and I promise you the work will find a way to get done. They can browse Facebook all they want.
What about work that does not have deadlines, but requires constant attention? Like monitoring security cameras, or the status of a medical patient or a nuclear power plant..
These types of work have the added risk of unauthorized people, such as the employee’s kids or friends, snooping in on sensitive information.
That might be helped by the employer providing a dedicated computer for remote work, with screen-recording and facial recognition that locks the system if you’re not (the only person) in view.
Perhaps having always-on video and voice surveillance on that computer, and announcing that fact, would force employees to create a dedicated distraction-free work environment in their homes.
It doesn't work that way, because most work is at least somewhat collaborative and that means the remote worker is not solely in control of the pace. As a remote worker I can't meet with someone in the office who doesn't respond to my pings. I can't commit my code if reviewers only respond once per day. If people have an across-the-desk conversation without me that invalidates what I just spent a day implementing, I'm screwed - either by losing that work or by having to spend time (and become The Bad Guy) by persuading them back to the right path. The only way around these issues is to multitask more, which we should all know by now creates its own productivity problems. If you think deadlines alone work, you can't have tried it for any but the most trivially separable kinds of work.
Exactly, and I'd argue the metrics you need to check that someone working remotely has been efficient is a much better business metric than ass-on-chair time.
I'm running a fully remote engineering team. There are plenty of difficulties and downsides unique to being remote, but one of the major benefit is that performance evaluation becomes much simpler, as you're not biased by seeing people sitting or not sitting at their desk.
I mean most people when they first start working remotely have trouble adjusting. After all, up until then their home is a place for rest, not for work!
It's probably that people are not accustomed to this flow
Remote work is a skill, it takes time to acquire, just like office work and barely less. (Have you forgotten how hard it was to stay put for 8+ hours in the same place? I still remember.)
My personal estimations -- it takes 18 month to work out an established routine, so any RW "decreed" on the worker before that time, is indeed effectively vacations.
The worst scheme is working from home 1-2 days a week, and coming to office for the rest. Beside the established routine it also requires adapting the sleep schedule (which is twice as hard if the RW days are floating, not fixed).
As another HKer, I just think that working practices at many companies in our city are not set up for remote work yet. There is a lot of reliance on micromanagement, paternalism and face-to-face communications. Working from home is too different from this.
I've also seen this in HK. The team I worked in, used to work mainly with people in Singapore, my local colleagues just didn't know what to do with their manager not being in the office with them. Half of the time they would just sit around and do nothing, until our manager explicitly told them what to do, and even then they struggled.
They are often not online and will only complete a few small tasks per day, because there is no threat from the boss who sees that you are browsing facebook instead of working.
And I'm sure they're worried about their friends, family and relatives that might be sick (and they can't get to). That worry will cause a productivity drop BECAUSE WE'RE ALL HUMAN.
If I were an employer, I think I'd probably give folks a bit of slack for the next several weeks.
I think this is highly dependent on culture. If you have a strongly hierarchy based culture where the boss is breathing down your neck all the time, then people are not going to deal well with being given freedom.
I have seen this time and again as a Norwegian, when living abroad. I come from a culture where power hierarchies are quite flat and there is a very high trust level between people. Bosses don't breath down your neck.
I remember an Indian manager who had worked long in Norway remarked on the difficulty of going back to India. People there are used to be bossed around and micromanaged all the time. The result is that it is difficult for them to manage themselves when the boss is gone. He remarked on the frustration of having to be present all the time for work to get done. I had gotten accustomed to not needing that in Norway.
But you don't have to go as far as India to see it. I got family and friends who observed the same in the UK. As soon as the boss left everybody started chatting and chilling.
I could see similar things when I studied in the US. American teenagers were often quite bad at managing themselves away from home. When I stayed over at people's places I realized why. Their parents where far stricter and far more micromanaging than I was used to. Even on campus there was far more rules and control than what would be normal in Northern Europe.
Stuff like that gives short term benefits of people behaving. The long term problem is that people get little to no training in managing themselves and setting their own boundaries. Autonomy and self control is not something you are born with. You have to train on it and learn it.
I find Scandinavian parents are far more tolerant towards kids screwing up and wasting their time. Part of that I think is they know kids must learn to handle situations themselves.
My wife is Asian-American and I know from all the stories she tells me that in Asia where it is even more control oriented and more ambitious it becomes even harder. Parents and teachers make all the "optimal" choices for you all the time, to push for success. She has family members who never chose even what clothes they wore all through childhood. Parents made all the choices.
I had a friend from Singapore. She remarked on how difficult it was coming to the US as a teenager. Suddenly teachers wanted to know her opinion on a variety of issues and subjects. But nobody had ever asked her opinion on anything before.
So I can imagine that remote working in Asia is going to be a lot harder than for many western countries. Even within the West there will be big differences in how well it can work.
But just so it is clear. I don't think the ability to work remote is inherent in people. I think with training Asian societies and workers can develop a culture for more independent working and working from home.
People who slack instantly when the boss leaves, are only working because they're being driven before the whip. It's not lack of self management. It's being dragged unwillingly into a tedious hell. Refusing "autonomy" in the circumstances, is a form of soft sabotage protest.
I think for most people makes job is something you have to do, you do it to make a living. Work is not fancy outside tech world: the pay is less, task is more repetitive than challenging, work is not dynamic.
Also working in HK, everyone is encouraged to work from home. I’ve been going into the office since my company issued laptop just isn’t equipped for software engineering. Our company VPN was also down the entire day, so not sure how anyone could’ve done any work.
On the upside, my commute to work has been quiet, and there’s no distractions in the office.
> from my subjective point of view, people seem to treat it as an extra vacation.
Every middle level managers job is depending on this belief. Once they accept people can work from home,their job becomes extinct its understandable but not true.
The fact that most people have never before had exposure to work from home (due to not being given the option until now) has to be taken into account. I doubt people would continue to treat it as an excuse to slack in the long-term.
no idea about HK law but in USA law not getting your tax bill has no bearing on your obligation to pay. Even getting bad info from the IRs does not give you an excuse to not pay it correctly and on time.
For working for home you need a system in place designed for remote work. Nothing to do with work ethic.
And this system will provide the feedback that controls the worker works or not.
In fact with remote work done right you control productivity much better, because you measure the real work or output a worker does.
With remote work you are not as influenced to subjective bias like how young or beautiful someone is, the neckline or skirt(if you are a man) that could affect you without you even realizing.
You don't need to reward someone looking productive, going early to work and leaving late, staying in place but pressing a key to watch facebook when nobody is looking.
You also don't need to punish someone who is productive, using way less time for doing the work and then leaving home or whatever.
This "theater of work" is very real and as a manager it could trick you.
With remote work you can measure the work what is critical for your business to succeed and demand it.
Someone told me once: How do you know your workers are not masturbating while working from home? Playing games or watching TV? Playing with their kids?
The fact is that I don't care if they remain productive and generate the work. In fact if they do the work, enjoining life is a bonus.
There is this Puritan mentality that for doing work you have to suffer and people that believe in that demanding not just work, but watching other people suffer while doing that. Because they actually do suffer, they need everybody that works for them to suffer too. They are sadistic.
I have seen that attitude in entrepreneur or managers colleagues: "Someone who works for me is enyoing the work and I can't stand it""I have to show him what real work is"
They prefer showing their workers how hard and miserable life is that earning money!!
My employer, after some bad winter weather the last couple of years, has been hemming and hawing about a work from home policy. There's definitely a pervasive mindset that people are less productive at home which might have some truth for some roles at our company. At first it was a "use your judgement and talk to your team leader, but if your kids have off school, just take a sick day", then they started being more explicit about acceptable reasons. Then a few months ago they added a three day limit per year. But last month they removed the limit again and on our local social media there has been speculating/joking that it's prep for coronavirus.
If people treat it as a free day off, then it sounds like the problem is not allowing working from home but a lack of effective performance management, or problems like that would quickly stop when.
Hi! Pretty sure we have the same employer.
I haven't seen those jokes, but I do recall the discussions around it. I wish the discussions were happening at work instead of anonymously.
Duuuude I was just asked to stay at home for 2 weeks because I might have coronavirus (I was in Shanghai "recently"). Sure as heck I'm not going to be productive. (I'm a software engineer in mountain view, and my company has asked me to WFH for 2 weeks)
Following reasons:
- Emotionally it's a tiny bit scary. hard to focus.
- I didn't have ANY time to setup -- a lot of my gear is still at work.
- My team didn't have time to prepare -- we still have daily standups which are hard to join from VC.
In a way that makes the experiment more interesting. You're kind of forced to try make things work under very sub-optimal conditions rather than some artifical text-book version of what we think work-from-home should ideally look like.
I reckon that after a few days of poor productivity, you and your colleagues will find ways to be productive despite of these circumstances, and in fact the difficult circumstances might even yield new and better processes and habits.
Depends how big the changes are. If you need to replace a whiteboard for task tracking with Jira, move your standups to a meeting room, and sort out the meeting room microphones that mean you can't always hear everyone well, the person might be back at work before you've finished all the reforms :)
They could priority mail you the stuff you need. They can add a laptop into someones hand or just make someone hold the phone for you to join the standup via Skype or something. The only argument I understand is the emotional one
I'm a software developer who maintains very strict separation between work hardware and personal hardware. I keep my work laptop at work and only take it home with me when I know I'll be working from home the next day. It's amazing to be able to commute with no bags or anything on the days I'm working in the office successively. If I was forced to WFH without notice due to Coronavirus and I didn't have my work laptop with me, I would not work at all. Someone would have to drive to my place with my work laptop or agree to pay for a new computer I'd buy for the purpose for those two weeks or so.
Even if "regular" productive work is hard, you could use the time to learn. Read books, build prototypes, think about the hard problems you, your team and your company are facing or will be facing.
This feel like a great way to get some thinking time!
It's horrible when the employer don't lower their expectation.
We had some campaign on remote working, actively adjust the toolset/processes/expectations, and we don't usually measure by output so it's a rather interesting experience for now.
> Emotionally it's a tiny bit scary. hard to focus.
These are just excuses. If you were going to get fired for not working or someone gave you a bonus of half a million for two weeks of work you’d sure as hell focus.
What’s stopping it from being a no brainer at this point? This feels like one of those things where old school taxi companies just couldn’t see how fast stuff like Uber/Lyft was going devour them.
Remote work and distributed teams is basically like fate at this point. If our economy is prepared to build a whole car in different parts of the world and then ship it to the US, you better believe your little job tasks that can easily be sent in email is going to have to reckon with that.
I've gotten into remote work experiments (unplanned) and it hadn't been all rosy. The good things are huge cut on unnecessary meetings and great productivity but the bad things include much harder path to collaborate.
For example, if you are designing a very complex system requiring multiple participants then it's very very hard to communicate your ideas over video conferences - even when tech worked flawlessly. It's not because people are not able to articulate the ideas but there is a lot goes on in body language, facial expressions and quick back-and-forth exchanges over whiteboard. The high bandwidth of occupying same physical 3D space permits speedy iterations while low bandwidth constraints what you must express in given slot you are expected to express.
So, remote work doesn't work for all scenarios. It works well when everyone knows things fair bit, number of iterations during communications needed are small and number of ideas don't need huge bandwidth. It doesn't work as well otherwise. For example, early days of startup where the product is in embryonic state, everybody working remotely would not work out well. However, if product is mature and roadmap is well under control then remote team might work great.
Don't forget we've spent a lifetime learning and perfecting the use of things like body language in face-to-face meetings. You can't just switch to video conferences and expect it to be flawless without practice. But if you do it a lot, you learn when you need to verbalize things you'd rely on conveying non-verbally in a face-to-face meeting, such as when you don't quite understand something.
I supervised an entire PhD remotely many years back. We made it work, and learned as we went. Over time we got better as expressing confusion, double checking understanding, and all those sort of things where we use non-verbal clues in face-to-face meetings. It worked, but it wasn't an easy path at first. But there was an unexpected plus side - I'd learned to vocalize my doubts and confusion better, and to double-check we're on the same page. And so ever since I've found I'm more effective in face-to-face meetings.
And yet, startups have been started as fully remote. Stack Overflow, Zapier, Seeq, just off the top of my head. And there are countless of successful open source projects as well.
Personally, while I agree that the bandwidth is higher locally, I don't agree you are prevented from expressing what you wish by communicating remotely; it just takes a bit longer, which is more than compensated by the time saved on other things.
It sounds like your taking your existing workflow and trying to virtualize it, this always fails. Remote work (especially with timezone differences) requires text based asynchronous communications, just look at large successful and international OSS projects, they thrived with mailing lists and IRC and this wasn't just because of bandwidth limitations.
IME unless your a particularly good teacher then your whiteboard isn't as high bandwidth as you think anyway. In face to face meetings everyone will just smile and nod because you have to go away and dig into the details to find issues. Put it in a graphviz drawing with the accompanying text and you'll get better results.
The tasks are not the hard part. Alignment is a lot easier when you’re all close. I went from a distributed team (4 offices spread between EU and US) to a team that’s all co-located. The speed and quality of alignment is miles different.
There’s stuff we outsource (easy to describe tasks), but the stuff that needs tight iteration loops is so much easier when you can just get up, walk a few meters, and talk about it.
I really think that in the future people will use something like holoportation[0] to work at home or remotely across the world. Because like you say sometimes it makes sense to be present with a person to accomplish a task. It is very hard if they are trying to describe something when it would only take half a moment to visually look yourself and understand the direction the person is coming from. Holoportation looks very neat I really hope I get to try it one day.
[0]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d59O6cfaM0
Training new employees is still quite a bit lower friction with on-premise work. This obviously depends on the kind of work you do, but in my case the work is sufficiently eclectic that even very smart and experienced people tend to take a long time until they have a good level of understanding of the problem domain.
That doesn't mean I'm against remote work, by the way, we do a lot of it. But we need to be realistic about its limitations.
Easy, you have a mandatory 2 week in office period for training and then move to off site. Whichever employee that will be training you will also come train you. The company can even pay for a coworking space that's in between or closer to trainer so they don't need to migrate for the training.
Remote work can be very effective but it's not for everyone, or at least not all the time.
We have a liberal remote working policy to the point where one of our team works from home almost all the time, whilst at the other end of the spectrum there are people who prefer to be in the office almost all the time, and then everything in between.
I fall somewhere in the middle. A day a week from home, particularly one with few or no meetings, can enable me to get a huge amount done. But I live alone so, whilst I am an introvert, I am not a misanthrope and need to ensure I get enough social contact.
Multiple consecutive days working from home can leave me feeling quite depressed and demotivated. I certainly wouldn't want to do it all the time.
I guess some people are more fit for remote work than others. I certainly miss day to day interaction with people, too.
I've had to do remote probably half dozen days in past couple of years. Here are some things I've observed:
1) As someone who do not regularly work from home, simply I'm not equipped well enough. I don't have extra monitors sitting around at home to hook up my laptop to give myself multiple monitors, for example, so I'm forced to work in a suboptimal setting.
2) Meetings can get tricky (Note: I also do language interpretation) I have mitigated this by hooking up my recording gear, which actually worked pretty decent.
3) Where there are clear objective for the day, it is relatively easy to handle. For anything other like supporting people who managed to show up at work remotely, was certainly harder part.
4) Everything becomes distractions. Something as simple as getting a cup of coffee. In other word I have to make one myself (or go out and get one myself) where at office I would have access to one close by or walk short distance to buy one.
I would probably sustain... maybe a week of remote at the most. Maybe regular remote workers have designed their life to work with it but certainly not for me. (Again, this also depending on the nature of tasks I need to get done.)
Except I don't have a suite of class A glassware, a dewar, liquid nitrogen, and semi-infinite fridge space at home nor have the infrastructure to provide them to all my people
Well for one, video calls don't really work, even with excellent internet connection. A lot of time is spent just trying to understand what the other person is saying and asking them to repeat or get closer to the mic, or mute themselves because we keep hearing their background noise.
Most importantly, distractions from family members and lack of a boss looking over your shoulder means most people's productivity will be perhaps 20% of normal.
> Well for one, video calls don't really work, even with excellent internet connection
I felt this way for a very long time. Then I switched jobs and realized (1) there are some very good video conferencing tools that work even on 1 bar of LTE (2) a small investment in a camera/headset/microphone goes a long ways.
We use your standard common video conferencing and screen sharing apps (Skype can do this, but I’m sure there are better options) if we need a quick chat or need to pair program. People just ping each other and agree on a time to sync up (usually immediately if possible , otherwise after your standard human bullshit like ‘grabbing some lunch first’). Its felt pretty natural, but since we are a fully distributed team, we had no choice but to get over the conceptual hang ups of not physically being near the other person.
But I agree, better tools that integrate communication with project management is going to be a good space to try to build something in.
Certain things are just a lot easier when you are together. I have never had as constructive discussions online as I have had when gathered in a room with a whiteboard.
Ironically am sitting here waiting for some upstream fixes from a team on the other side of the planet before I can even start my work this week, it was meant to be done a few days ago.
Perhaps some things are more assembly line than you might imagine.
And once everything that doesn't require a physical presence (factory, warehouse jobs and so forth) worked just fine during all of this managers in more traditional companies all over the world are still going to find excuses why work from home is impossible for them. Because most of these guys just want to be able to control their employees.
They will until they don’t, right? These are the same people that will outsource entire teams offshore to complete things when it’s cheaper. There’s a lot of talk about worker productivity in this thread, but I promise you in several years when these companies are able to simply hire cheaper labor outside of tech centers, you won’t hear shit about remote work being unproductive lol.
If the productivity drop is less than the cost decrease and quality level/delivery dates are still met, definitely. I'd love my employer to pay my internet bill and let me work from home more often.
I'd need my employer to cover the bill because I'd need to bypass my IPS's 1tb cap and bump my upload speeds a bit to keep things working well. I do a lot of data transfers and archive management.
Yeah this has been my problem with the argument against remote work. Everyone at my old company always used to talk about how people needed to be face to face to get things done and collaborate. And yet we continued to hire and grow sister teams over in India that we worked with extensively for years, with no problems.
> everything that doesn't require a physical presence (factory, warehouse jobs and so forth)
I don't know what kind of fairy tale world you're from, but you need actual human on site to fix and mend broken machines AND broken operation processes, and also need managers to manage those men.
Also, employees are stakeholders, too, and it's often important to gather various information to gain insights into the operations of the company, so that they can speak up before it's too late. Being able to observe actual processes also helps managers to more precisely understand and analyze operations. (Not that these work as intended in real world, tho.)
Otherwise i agree. Having just spent a week on-site at a client, you just notice a lot more problems (or start to understand the details of previously identified problems) that are in your capacity to fix.
I expect a huge rise in depression the more people work at home. Some people are fairly isolated and get a needed portion of their interaction quota from work. Without something to fill the defecit they will struggle
Yes, working from home has some drawbacks. That, and also some guilt over the fact that your employer is doing you a favour. I work from home and tend to worry that colleagues think I'm slacking. I don't think they do but it put some extra pressure.
the more people work at home the more likely it is they will find ways to compensate as a group. stay-at-home moms must have been facing these issues forever.
> I expect a huge rise in depression the more people work at home
Offset by a huge fall in depression by those who are introverts and don't function well in open floor plan office environments. Workspace happiness isn't universal.
I am quarantined in a german military base after flying out of Wuhan with a german air force evacuation flight.
We have wifi on the base, the backbone is struggling though - 120 bored people I guess...
we were only checked for symptoms before the flight. Nobody with symptoms was allowed to board (I think everybody boarded though). After arrival everybody went to a medical check and they took a saliva sample that was sent to a lab. So those confirmed cases went to the quarantine quarters first and only got taken out and brought to the hospital the morning after.
I know a person on mainland China and they are bored out of their mind. They are a pilot and have nothing to do, especially since the volume of flights has dropped significantly
Seriously, there's going to be some insane creativity in the Chinese economy in the next 1-4 quarters, but we won't see evidence of it for at least a year.
It would be interesting to find out what motivates people when they are the in the office? There was a fad for presence and virtual office type systems in the past and I have heard that some media companies have a permanent group video conference. For me it's just being around people who are busy at their desks that motivates me.
The productive part of it is awesome. We got some organisational ideas from trying to stop people dying before. Checklists, triage, and justification by data visualisation just off the top of my head, but I'm sure there was more.
This is absolutely NOT a good thing. Or 'awesome'. You cant teach a class full of elementary schoolers 'from home'. You cannot manufacture electronics 'from home'. This is going to have lasting, major effects on the worlds economy. I'm personally selling all my index fund stock tomorrow morning.
You’re too late. The expected impact of this event is already priced in. Unless you foresee the impacts being much worse than the few lost weeks, don’t change now. The sell-off you wanted to avoid already happened over the last week.
> You cant teach a class full of elementary schoolers 'from home.'
Why not? Kids seem perfectly willing to sit in front of screens — they would probably be perfectly willing to sit in front of screens on a group chat, learning from a teacher and interacting with their friends.
> You cannot manufacture electronics 'from home.'
A robot factory can! Granted, that switch won't be so great for the human workers who used to do that job.
...or we might find that it's not that big a deal to miss a few weeks of work or school so long as everyone knows why and understands it's for the greater good.
Team building, wining and dining are resource intensive activities as it is, and we would do well to adopt WFH more to save the environment too. Replace Coronavirus threat with the threat of environmental destruction and you get similar solutions.
Don't think about it as _the_ coronavirus. Think of it as _a new virus_ and things start to make more sense. Over the next 100 years _a new virus_ is likely going to develop that spreads quickly and is lethal. When a new one comes up it's hard to tell initial how it spreads, how fast it spreads, and how lethal it is. For now, I think it's unlikely that the coronavirus will kill all that many people. For now, I think more people should just get the flu shot and not worry about coronavirus. But I'll update my opinion if the spread and death toll seem to worsen.
As an aside, stopping pandemics is on of the main things that Bill Gates is passionate about.
High lethality and high virulence are opposed to each other. Most of the people who have died from coronavirus have been older people with weaker immune systems.
For coronavirus, it doesn't necessarily have to be the death rate as of this moment that should cause worry. Coronavirus can cause ARDS, described here: https://youtu.be/okg7uq_HrhQ
Treating ARDS in a handful of cases isn't so bad. It's treating ARDS in hundreds of thousands of people that's very very bad.
Hospitals can quickly become full and hospitals also rely on supply chains for materials, which would also become overwhelmed.
I'm not saying panic is the right thing to do, because it isn't, but what I am saying is that the quarantines aren't excessive and there's a reason why governments are paying attention.
As a MechE, I'm always super jealous of my Software Engineer counterparts in terms of work from home. I know a bunch of teams are actually heavily recommended to work from home at least once a week.
Definitely a lot of upsides in being a MechE. Making physical stuff is really fulfilling and using really expensive equipment is fun. If your hands are itching to make something on the side, I highly recommend 3D printers! They're really fun to play with and the cost barrier is pretty low nowadays (like the Prusa Mini which is ~$400).
100% remote swe. I don't design hardware, but the company does, and somehow prototypes hop into a cardboard box and get themselves hauled to my door. I could imagine working with schematics and drawings remotely.
I'm also a SWE who mostly works remote. I get tired of being in my house. Sometimes it feels like I'm trapped. I don't have a car so I don't really get out much or go far or travel much.
Hmm, my wife is ME and I'm SWE. She works from home but I can't.
Note I wouldn't want her job for anything. She has to deal with suppliers from all over the world, which means working ~24/6 (plus a seventh day to get her own work done). And has the generous "unlimited" vacation that translates as "no" vacation, unlike software companies that (generally) encourage you to take advantage of it. And makes midwest salary while living on west coast.
I'm on a similar boat (definitely not as bad as your wife's situation though). I feel like the unlimited vacation is so much more unfavorable to hardware engineers. It seems unprofessional to take vacation in the middle of a project but our projects are so long to begin with. This plus the fact we're always fighting fires because one mistake in planning can really screw up the schedule. Not sure where your wife works but hardware at FAANGs aren't too bad (minus crunch time near product release). Possible change for your wife if she's interested.
There is a downside to this - there are no clear work hours boundaries. My father who is a MechE is annoyed that I am often running to my laptop to answer mails, or to code etc beyond a fixed 8-9 hr in a day.
If you make clear boundaries, there are clear boundaries. If you ignore all work emails outside of your working hours, the problem is "solved" (ideally don't have work emails etc. on any device you use outside of "work hours")
If you are working with robotics, the software engineer still have to come in to test their software on the actually hardware.
Software engineers may have simulators to allow testing SW at home, but mechanical engineers also have their 3D modeling and finite element analysis that they can do at home. Oh, and redlines and pushing PLM paper work should be doable at home.
I'm not saying its one-to-one, but MEs and SEs in robotics both have things that can and cannot be done remotely.
I'm super interested in this! My job is pretty CAD heavy but the stuff I work on can get pretty big too. Can you elaborate using the email in my profile?
So far their compensation is a lot higher than mechanical engineers though, especially in the US. And US software engineers are paid a lot higher than in other countries, so that effect is unseen for now.
food, utilities can be sterilized with gamma radiation, water with UV radiation. I am thinking of making a battery backpack for UV LED sterilization of air, so that it is durable and reusable, as mask production is not keeping up with demand, and they are roughly single-use items...
while in Silicon Valley we'll be coming into our modern freshly remodeled no expense spared creativity and collaboration inducing open floors with energy efficient weak AC&ventilation and waiting until somebody brings it in ...
Beijing authorities require companies to extends for a week unless the company is either critical industries or can fully work-from-home. My company started to fully work-from-home from today, for at least 2 weeks.
This experiment is massive, industries usually move forward only when it's mandatory. I believe this is a great chance that would make people see a lot of professions could be handled quite well remotely, and face-to-face is not that mandatory.
Also, some off-topic info/experiences in case anyone wonders - yesterday I was back from San Francisco to Beijing, here's what I saw:
1. Almost every Chinese I saw during the trip wares a mask. In SFO airport, during the flight, Beijing airport, and on the street. Not many people wear gloves. One guy even wears goggles. I wore an N95 mask and vinyl gloves (couldn't find surgical gloves, and masks are sold out for a lot of pharmacies) for the whole trip (like 15 hours), not the most pleasant experience but acceptable.
2. I filled in two additional forms on the flight which asked if I have been to Hubei (the province which Wuhan located in). One from the custom authority and one from Beijing authority, but the forms are almost identical.
3. When I tried to take a lift, I found Didi (Uber/Lyft counterpart) requires every driver and passenger to wear a mask or everyone has the right to reject and report others if they don't. I guess would I have to take the metro if I didn't buy a mask in the US, but I'm also not sure if the metro staff would let me in if that was the case. Simply put, there are tons of public places that reject people that don't wear masks, it seems to be a very hard time for people who are unfortunately couldn't buy/afford overpriced masks.
4. There are people on the street, but very few. It was the last day of the holiday, in prior years it should be crowded already because people migrate back from every province to Beijing.
5. When I back to my apartment, I found almost every apartment would have security guards stop visitors from entering the apartment, for those who live here requires to show a paper from the apartment to enter freely. Rumor says there are even apartments lockdown themselves that people cannot go out, I'm not sure if it's true.
6. Although Beijing is always easy to buy everything online, food delivery choices only have very few options left for now. Not sure if it would back to normal after the holiday ends. Other than food and medical supplies, things haven't changed much. And also delivery guys cannot enter the apartment, so people have to go outside the apartment to get the delivery.
7. For the rest of the week, I'm going to live on instant noodles and some simple foods. Wish me good luck =)
There aren't many. Traditionally, Chinese people would rather endure. There are a lot of families play mahjong all day long, but it's unfortunate for those who don't have 4 players in the family - most of the public places to play mahjong have been shutdown.
For young people, their interests are more westernized, varies from person to person so that depends. It's more introverted people favored when people cannot go outside.
Luckily, the Internet plays a centric role in people's daily life, at least in cities and towns.
For the countryside, villages lockdown themselves by rejecting strangers and far relatives, but villagers can still move around.
Meanwhile in the United States I continue to have to share a desk with someone from another shift, all of us do, and as I was typing this I heard 2 different people sneeze, one immediately in front of me that turned in my direction and sneezed towards the floor without covering. Which he's done several times a day for a week.
Fun fun fun.
Stocked up on several containers of wipes and several things of hand sanitizer this weekend. Normally not my thing but the office has already had a stomach bug and a flu blaze through the bulk of 180~ people this year, I'll spend some money for peace of mind while this Coronavirus is doing its thing.
Eh, my father is a vice-manager of a company's information department. Damn he's been struggling with getting hundreds of people to work remotely for more than 2 weeks. I'm not familiar with those stuff but sounds like he's trying to build a solution with MS RDP and/or Citrix's tech. He's been on his phone for hours and hours these days... Ruined our Chinese New Year if you'd ask me.
Maybe those who WFH during this situation will develop some empathy for full-time remote workers ... because for damn sure most of them have none. There are some issues that are obvious and easily addressed, like leaving stakeholders out of a meeting entirely ("couldn't find a room on short notice"). There are others that are hard to notice unless you're subject to them all the time.
* A VPN that's OK for short-term use, but unreliable enough to cause multiple flow disruptions every single day.
* Extremely slow (and often more contentious) document/code reviews because people aren't as comfortable with written communication as ftf.
* Losing every commit race because of the above, and having to spend more time than anyone else handling tricky merges.
* Being in effective listen-only mode in meetings because of constant interruption and side chatter (or not even able to hear if half the participants are loudly eating lunch the entire time).
* IDEs that lose their ability to navigate code because the connection to the cross-referencing engine can't survive high latency. (BTW this is related to having a giant monorepo, which is itself a bit of a remote-hostile choice.)
There are many more. Working from home has its advantages, but doing so in an office-first environment can be frustrating too. Maybe those who experience some of that frustration for a few days will at least stop criticizing others for things that aren't their fault.
Because everyone isn't unaccustomed to working from home - they are going to be tremendously inefficient, and will later assume that all those WFH employees are also therefor chronically inefficient.
You may wonder why but some School in a sense no choice. The university worldwide needed an exam result and that is a strange thing now the exam will be done in March. In Hong Kong basically the turmoil meant it would be very bad for the result for the young kids.
But not all needed. Take a rest and stay healthy more important.
I'm planning on moving back to HK this May so I hope this has all blown over by then. I just heard my boss managed to get back to HK a day before they stopped people leaving the village he was in. Now he has to work from home for 2 weeks before he's allowed back to the office.
flu seasons are the worst, everywhere. we should either move a do-nothing holiday to overlap with flu season, or make it 'worldwide work from home weeks'
Its bad if you don't have an active social life and/or are doing it exclusively from home.
The WFH arrangements mostly being discussed are more about working 1-2 days a week from home.
> A 2015 study from Stanford University in California found that productivity among call-center employees at Chinese travel agency Ctrip went up by 13% when they worked from home due to fewer breaks and more comfortable work environments.
This study which they (And everyone repetitively) quotes, was fulltime.
But part time and for periods when other things in someones life are stressful, I agree it can make sense. Same for part time study.
"The flat wage <> averaging around ¥1,300 per month. The bonus portion depended on the individual’s monthly performance and averaged about ¥1,000 ($160) per month."
I'm dubious why this study keeps getting quoted, it's not great to compare too.
Coronavirus is far more infectious than sars. Numbers infected are likely 100k or more. This will become a pandemic. I can’t see how they can contain this. What we don’t know yet, is the mortality rate. Yes, we know the Chinese are hiding the deaths.
Some outcomes of this morning:
1. Alibaba's teamwork app, Dingtalk, crashed around 9AM due to too many concurrent video conference saturate the server and bandwitdh
2. Tencent's for enterprise messaging app, Wechat for Business, crashed. Connection is extremely unstable
3. Baidu's office VPN was busy and employees are asked to stay disconnected to leave bandwith for sysadmins
4. Huawei's WeLink was unavailable for a while
5. Bytedance (company behind TikTok)'s Lark, an online office suite like GApps was the biggest winner, only had some minor issues.
6. Zoom offered a free version to mainland users and it's extremely popular. But it lacks non-video-conf features. e.g. simple daily poll to see if your colleagues were healthy or not.
I've created a temp account for this to be on the safe side :)
I work for a big (300k+ ) company with some tens of thousand office workers in CN We are preparing since about 2 weeks to upgrade our remote access infra in China with partial success as something which would be a soft upgrade everywhere else needs to go through various levels of local subcontractors and partners of our provider
On top of that because of the Internet situation in CN it is not practically easy to use remote access via another location with higher capacity - the performance gets degraded very quickly - or use resources directly over the internet eg. RTC which is not hosted locally
I doubt that local authorities will change something in the future because of this example but one can only hope
are you the same guy on r/sysadmin?
Try use MPLS. It's expensive but the latency and bandwidth is guaranteed.
1 reply →
This "experiment" will set a new baseline on which management can act with the goal to satisfy such use cases and grant the necessary resources to implement them.
Well the clock is ticking for non-Chinese companies. When SARS struck in 2003, it took about four months for the total global number of cases to crest. Assuming the same sort of pattern here with the same WFH response, we will see peak VPN/remote usage in April/May.
....so get those requisitions in boys.
4 replies →
Seems like the experiment was a success: systems have very low margins to operate.
We need peer to peer. These central hubs can’t hack the traffic.
26 replies →
It would be interesting to know where are the bottlenecks and how quickly they can be addressed.
I suspect that they might be addressed in time for the next epidemic
That's good to hear. Especially that last point: zoom has been repeatedly blocked by China. It would be interesting to see if they could keep those users
IIRC Zoom released a tailored "China" version.
My wife is a high-school teacher in Shenzhen and her school has suspended physical attendance thru Feb 17th, possibly to be extended until the start of March. However, they are requiring teachers and students to work full-time from home using online assignments and communications channels. It struck me that this is indeed a huge experiment in remote working, even for professions that don't typically have that option at all whatsoever (i.e. school teachers).
They have that option in the US, just not with public schools. I’ve been told that even public schools work that way in Australia under normal conditions.
Most people can’t work from home because of local tradition not because it doesn’t work.
I've heard from relatives that it is the same thing in Hong Kong. Last time I talked to them they said it has been quite difficult so far. I'm not sure if they have had any training to prepare for this at all or if they are just winging it.
Hong Kong has gone further - schools are closed until at least the first week of March.
Lack of space at home might also be an issue. Hong Kong flats can be pretty small.
Many homes aren’t really suited to WFH, especially regular WFH. They might be noisy during the day, lack space, lack decent network connections, etc...you also can’t really WFH from a quiet public space like a library (not that HK really has those).
Schools in Singapore are regularly required to practice the so-called "e-learning" every semester/quarter. It's quite common for richer Asian countries that had been through SARS to think of these contingency plans.
Also it was nothing fancy. Just recorded video lectures, and an online forum.
> However, they are requiring teachers and students to work full-time from home using online assignments and communications channels.
They did that 20 years ago during SARS, too.
interesting, I'm very curious which tools she's using for all this :)
they're about to start experimenting with Zoom, which should be super interesting especially with primary/middle school students. a lot of the teachers are quite unhappy about it
I am currently soft-quarantined by my employer in Hong Kong because I recently visited Mainland China, and will be working from home for 14 days, along with many others.
It's not going that well: from my subjective point of view, people seem to treat it as an extra vacation. They are often not online and will only complete a few small tasks per day, because there is no threat from the boss who sees that you are browsing facebook instead of working.
Even government employees are at home. Many people didn't get their tax bill so they don't need to pay tax for now. Sweet!
That experiment makes me think that perhaps work from home is optimal mostly for a small pool of highly motivated and talented individuals, such as the average person on HN who actually does feel more productive working from home. Outside of HN, work ethic could be different.
Well, of course you can't just switch to remote work overnight without any preparation, and expect everything to work well immediately! But, for example: how do you know those workers are treating it as a small vacation? You're not there to see them either! Managers can do the same, they don't need to know what the worker is doing instead of working; they can see the work is not getting done.
I would guess a lot are also not set up at home to work efficiently. I.e. proper desk in a quiet room etc. And if the kids are home from school as well, I assume it is very hard to concentrate on working from home.
Also if there is the threat of an incoming pandemic, then my priorities would be elsewhere than work. I.e. securing family, provisions, medicines, etc. And checking news sources about the epidemic every 5 minutes is not good for efficiency...
1 reply →
I think one obstacle is that in practice, it is difficult to tell someone "your performance is bad today and you are not getting work done".
15 replies →
For most modern work it's difficult to see if the work is being done, whether people are at home or in the office. For the stuff you can watch it's mostly impossible to do at home.
There is one major requirement for remote work, it’s called deadlines. Give people a paycheck, some requirements, and deadlines and I promise you the work will find a way to get done. They can browse Facebook all they want.
What about work that does not have deadlines, but requires constant attention? Like monitoring security cameras, or the status of a medical patient or a nuclear power plant..
These types of work have the added risk of unauthorized people, such as the employee’s kids or friends, snooping in on sensitive information.
That might be helped by the employer providing a dedicated computer for remote work, with screen-recording and facial recognition that locks the system if you’re not (the only person) in view.
Perhaps having always-on video and voice surveillance on that computer, and announcing that fact, would force employees to create a dedicated distraction-free work environment in their homes.
17 replies →
It doesn't work that way, because most work is at least somewhat collaborative and that means the remote worker is not solely in control of the pace. As a remote worker I can't meet with someone in the office who doesn't respond to my pings. I can't commit my code if reviewers only respond once per day. If people have an across-the-desk conversation without me that invalidates what I just spent a day implementing, I'm screwed - either by losing that work or by having to spend time (and become The Bad Guy) by persuading them back to the right path. The only way around these issues is to multitask more, which we should all know by now creates its own productivity problems. If you think deadlines alone work, you can't have tried it for any but the most trivially separable kinds of work.
2 replies →
Deadlines are the incompetent manager's virtual whip.
Exactly, and I'd argue the metrics you need to check that someone working remotely has been efficient is a much better business metric than ass-on-chair time.
I'm running a fully remote engineering team. There are plenty of difficulties and downsides unique to being remote, but one of the major benefit is that performance evaluation becomes much simpler, as you're not biased by seeing people sitting or not sitting at their desk.
Fully remote is very different than partial remote, which is the situation here and one that companies still need to learn how to deal with.
I think it's a misconception that remote work has to be async.
You can breath down people's neck just as well over a video link, and there are multiple apps to help scale that.
Whether that's desirable or not is another topic, but why not solve one problem at a time?
Are you saying manager oversight is what's keeping your co-workers from slacking off all day? Is this a place that produces quality of any kind?
I mean most people when they first start working remotely have trouble adjusting. After all, up until then their home is a place for rest, not for work!
It's probably that people are not accustomed to this flow
1 reply →
For many jobs that's how it works. A lot of work is not about quality, tasks just have to be completed according to schedule.
4 replies →
Remote work is a skill, it takes time to acquire, just like office work and barely less. (Have you forgotten how hard it was to stay put for 8+ hours in the same place? I still remember.)
My personal estimations -- it takes 18 month to work out an established routine, so any RW "decreed" on the worker before that time, is indeed effectively vacations.
The worst scheme is working from home 1-2 days a week, and coming to office for the rest. Beside the established routine it also requires adapting the sleep schedule (which is twice as hard if the RW days are floating, not fixed).
Why does working from home 1-2 days a week require changing your sleep schedule?
3 replies →
As another HKer, I just think that working practices at many companies in our city are not set up for remote work yet. There is a lot of reliance on micromanagement, paternalism and face-to-face communications. Working from home is too different from this.
I've also seen this in HK. The team I worked in, used to work mainly with people in Singapore, my local colleagues just didn't know what to do with their manager not being in the office with them. Half of the time they would just sit around and do nothing, until our manager explicitly told them what to do, and even then they struggled.
2 replies →
They are often not online and will only complete a few small tasks per day, because there is no threat from the boss who sees that you are browsing facebook instead of working.
And I'm sure they're worried about their friends, family and relatives that might be sick (and they can't get to). That worry will cause a productivity drop BECAUSE WE'RE ALL HUMAN.
If I were an employer, I think I'd probably give folks a bit of slack for the next several weeks.
I think this is highly dependent on culture. If you have a strongly hierarchy based culture where the boss is breathing down your neck all the time, then people are not going to deal well with being given freedom.
I have seen this time and again as a Norwegian, when living abroad. I come from a culture where power hierarchies are quite flat and there is a very high trust level between people. Bosses don't breath down your neck.
I remember an Indian manager who had worked long in Norway remarked on the difficulty of going back to India. People there are used to be bossed around and micromanaged all the time. The result is that it is difficult for them to manage themselves when the boss is gone. He remarked on the frustration of having to be present all the time for work to get done. I had gotten accustomed to not needing that in Norway.
But you don't have to go as far as India to see it. I got family and friends who observed the same in the UK. As soon as the boss left everybody started chatting and chilling.
I could see similar things when I studied in the US. American teenagers were often quite bad at managing themselves away from home. When I stayed over at people's places I realized why. Their parents where far stricter and far more micromanaging than I was used to. Even on campus there was far more rules and control than what would be normal in Northern Europe.
Stuff like that gives short term benefits of people behaving. The long term problem is that people get little to no training in managing themselves and setting their own boundaries. Autonomy and self control is not something you are born with. You have to train on it and learn it.
I find Scandinavian parents are far more tolerant towards kids screwing up and wasting their time. Part of that I think is they know kids must learn to handle situations themselves.
My wife is Asian-American and I know from all the stories she tells me that in Asia where it is even more control oriented and more ambitious it becomes even harder. Parents and teachers make all the "optimal" choices for you all the time, to push for success. She has family members who never chose even what clothes they wore all through childhood. Parents made all the choices.
I had a friend from Singapore. She remarked on how difficult it was coming to the US as a teenager. Suddenly teachers wanted to know her opinion on a variety of issues and subjects. But nobody had ever asked her opinion on anything before.
So I can imagine that remote working in Asia is going to be a lot harder than for many western countries. Even within the West there will be big differences in how well it can work.
But just so it is clear. I don't think the ability to work remote is inherent in people. I think with training Asian societies and workers can develop a culture for more independent working and working from home.
There's another aspect to it.
People who slack instantly when the boss leaves, are only working because they're being driven before the whip. It's not lack of self management. It's being dragged unwillingly into a tedious hell. Refusing "autonomy" in the circumstances, is a form of soft sabotage protest.
3 replies →
If I was forced to be at home, I would probably not work much either. My productive WFH days are when I actually want to be at home.
I think for most people makes job is something you have to do, you do it to make a living. Work is not fancy outside tech world: the pay is less, task is more repetitive than challenging, work is not dynamic.
Also working in HK, everyone is encouraged to work from home. I’ve been going into the office since my company issued laptop just isn’t equipped for software engineering. Our company VPN was also down the entire day, so not sure how anyone could’ve done any work.
On the upside, my commute to work has been quiet, and there’s no distractions in the office.
> from my subjective point of view, people seem to treat it as an extra vacation.
Every middle level managers job is depending on this belief. Once they accept people can work from home,their job becomes extinct its understandable but not true.
The fact that most people have never before had exposure to work from home (due to not being given the option until now) has to be taken into account. I doubt people would continue to treat it as an excuse to slack in the long-term.
Enforce the use of https://www.rescuetime.com/ may help.
Considering they might be worried sick about friends and family (and therefore using social media) this would be awful.
The world needs less authoritarianism and more compassion right now. We're all human.
no idea about HK law but in USA law not getting your tax bill has no bearing on your obligation to pay. Even getting bad info from the IRs does not give you an excuse to not pay it correctly and on time.
For working for home you need a system in place designed for remote work. Nothing to do with work ethic.
And this system will provide the feedback that controls the worker works or not.
In fact with remote work done right you control productivity much better, because you measure the real work or output a worker does.
With remote work you are not as influenced to subjective bias like how young or beautiful someone is, the neckline or skirt(if you are a man) that could affect you without you even realizing.
You don't need to reward someone looking productive, going early to work and leaving late, staying in place but pressing a key to watch facebook when nobody is looking.
You also don't need to punish someone who is productive, using way less time for doing the work and then leaving home or whatever.
This "theater of work" is very real and as a manager it could trick you.
With remote work you can measure the work what is critical for your business to succeed and demand it.
Someone told me once: How do you know your workers are not masturbating while working from home? Playing games or watching TV? Playing with their kids?
The fact is that I don't care if they remain productive and generate the work. In fact if they do the work, enjoining life is a bonus.
There is this Puritan mentality that for doing work you have to suffer and people that believe in that demanding not just work, but watching other people suffer while doing that. Because they actually do suffer, they need everybody that works for them to suffer too. They are sadistic.
I have seen that attitude in entrepreneur or managers colleagues: "Someone who works for me is enyoing the work and I can't stand it""I have to show him what real work is"
They prefer showing their workers how hard and miserable life is that earning money!!
My employer, after some bad winter weather the last couple of years, has been hemming and hawing about a work from home policy. There's definitely a pervasive mindset that people are less productive at home which might have some truth for some roles at our company. At first it was a "use your judgement and talk to your team leader, but if your kids have off school, just take a sick day", then they started being more explicit about acceptable reasons. Then a few months ago they added a three day limit per year. But last month they removed the limit again and on our local social media there has been speculating/joking that it's prep for coronavirus.
Same here, we tried allowing work from home once a week but people just treated it as a free day off.
We also had to enforce starting hours, otherwise some developers would show up by 11:30 yet they will still leave work sharp on time.
If people treat it as a free day off, then it sounds like the problem is not allowing working from home but a lack of effective performance management, or problems like that would quickly stop when.
8 replies →
Maybe a four day work week would be healthy and make for more productive workers.
7 replies →
What about amount of work though? Did the velocity or quality drop?
3 replies →
Hi! Pretty sure we have the same employer. I haven't seen those jokes, but I do recall the discussions around it. I wish the discussions were happening at work instead of anonymously.
Same here, unless the same exact pattern is happening across a bunch of companies. Deep Space?
1 reply →
This is a horrible "experiment".
Duuuude I was just asked to stay at home for 2 weeks because I might have coronavirus (I was in Shanghai "recently"). Sure as heck I'm not going to be productive. (I'm a software engineer in mountain view, and my company has asked me to WFH for 2 weeks)
Following reasons:
- Emotionally it's a tiny bit scary. hard to focus.
- I didn't have ANY time to setup -- a lot of my gear is still at work.
- My team didn't have time to prepare -- we still have daily standups which are hard to join from VC.
In a way that makes the experiment more interesting. You're kind of forced to try make things work under very sub-optimal conditions rather than some artifical text-book version of what we think work-from-home should ideally look like. I reckon that after a few days of poor productivity, you and your colleagues will find ways to be productive despite of these circumstances, and in fact the difficult circumstances might even yield new and better processes and habits.
I guess the only thing is it risks giving the panopticon micromanagement brigade an unfair point when some of these arrangements do go awry.
Depends how big the changes are. If you need to replace a whiteboard for task tracking with Jira, move your standups to a meeting room, and sort out the meeting room microphones that mean you can't always hear everyone well, the person might be back at work before you've finished all the reforms :)
1 reply →
They could priority mail you the stuff you need. They can add a laptop into someones hand or just make someone hold the phone for you to join the standup via Skype or something. The only argument I understand is the emotional one
Is this the google equivalent of “I went to a school outside of Boston”?
(Intuit also has a significant presence in Mountain View)
1 reply →
Are you a software engineer? Just wondering what 'gear' you really need - as opposed to would like - to do your job.
I'm a software developer who maintains very strict separation between work hardware and personal hardware. I keep my work laptop at work and only take it home with me when I know I'll be working from home the next day. It's amazing to be able to commute with no bags or anything on the days I'm working in the office successively. If I was forced to WFH without notice due to Coronavirus and I didn't have my work laptop with me, I would not work at all. Someone would have to drive to my place with my work laptop or agree to pay for a new computer I'd buy for the purpose for those two weeks or so.
11 replies →
Even if "regular" productive work is hard, you could use the time to learn. Read books, build prototypes, think about the hard problems you, your team and your company are facing or will be facing.
This feel like a great way to get some thinking time!
It's horrible when the employer don't lower their expectation.
We had some campaign on remote working, actively adjust the toolset/processes/expectations, and we don't usually measure by output so it's a rather interesting experience for now.
Cant you get some one to have that gear sent to you
> Emotionally it's a tiny bit scary. hard to focus.
These are just excuses. If you were going to get fired for not working or someone gave you a bonus of half a million for two weeks of work you’d sure as hell focus.
What’s stopping it from being a no brainer at this point? This feels like one of those things where old school taxi companies just couldn’t see how fast stuff like Uber/Lyft was going devour them.
Remote work and distributed teams is basically like fate at this point. If our economy is prepared to build a whole car in different parts of the world and then ship it to the US, you better believe your little job tasks that can easily be sent in email is going to have to reckon with that.
I've gotten into remote work experiments (unplanned) and it hadn't been all rosy. The good things are huge cut on unnecessary meetings and great productivity but the bad things include much harder path to collaborate.
For example, if you are designing a very complex system requiring multiple participants then it's very very hard to communicate your ideas over video conferences - even when tech worked flawlessly. It's not because people are not able to articulate the ideas but there is a lot goes on in body language, facial expressions and quick back-and-forth exchanges over whiteboard. The high bandwidth of occupying same physical 3D space permits speedy iterations while low bandwidth constraints what you must express in given slot you are expected to express.
So, remote work doesn't work for all scenarios. It works well when everyone knows things fair bit, number of iterations during communications needed are small and number of ideas don't need huge bandwidth. It doesn't work as well otherwise. For example, early days of startup where the product is in embryonic state, everybody working remotely would not work out well. However, if product is mature and roadmap is well under control then remote team might work great.
Don't forget we've spent a lifetime learning and perfecting the use of things like body language in face-to-face meetings. You can't just switch to video conferences and expect it to be flawless without practice. But if you do it a lot, you learn when you need to verbalize things you'd rely on conveying non-verbally in a face-to-face meeting, such as when you don't quite understand something.
I supervised an entire PhD remotely many years back. We made it work, and learned as we went. Over time we got better as expressing confusion, double checking understanding, and all those sort of things where we use non-verbal clues in face-to-face meetings. It worked, but it wasn't an easy path at first. But there was an unexpected plus side - I'd learned to vocalize my doubts and confusion better, and to double-check we're on the same page. And so ever since I've found I'm more effective in face-to-face meetings.
1 reply →
And yet, startups have been started as fully remote. Stack Overflow, Zapier, Seeq, just off the top of my head. And there are countless of successful open source projects as well.
Personally, while I agree that the bandwidth is higher locally, I don't agree you are prevented from expressing what you wish by communicating remotely; it just takes a bit longer, which is more than compensated by the time saved on other things.
3 replies →
It sounds like your taking your existing workflow and trying to virtualize it, this always fails. Remote work (especially with timezone differences) requires text based asynchronous communications, just look at large successful and international OSS projects, they thrived with mailing lists and IRC and this wasn't just because of bandwidth limitations.
IME unless your a particularly good teacher then your whiteboard isn't as high bandwidth as you think anyway. In face to face meetings everyone will just smile and nod because you have to go away and dig into the details to find issues. Put it in a graphviz drawing with the accompanying text and you'll get better results.
That is just the inability of the participants to think more than talk. For example Lisp requires more thinking, or chess requires lots of thinking.
The tasks are not the hard part. Alignment is a lot easier when you’re all close. I went from a distributed team (4 offices spread between EU and US) to a team that’s all co-located. The speed and quality of alignment is miles different.
There’s stuff we outsource (easy to describe tasks), but the stuff that needs tight iteration loops is so much easier when you can just get up, walk a few meters, and talk about it.
The Linux kernel is developed remotely. I'm tiring of hearing cat food delivery startups pretend it won't work for them.
11 replies →
I really think that in the future people will use something like holoportation[0] to work at home or remotely across the world. Because like you say sometimes it makes sense to be present with a person to accomplish a task. It is very hard if they are trying to describe something when it would only take half a moment to visually look yourself and understand the direction the person is coming from. Holoportation looks very neat I really hope I get to try it one day. [0]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d59O6cfaM0
2 replies →
I’m sorry if I sound harsh. The problem is not a matter of better or worse “alignment”.
It’s just poor quality planning and execution.
Your team is just improvising, figuring out as you go, what is exactly that you need to build.
It’s not even Agile. Agile is about tight loop upfront planning, and avoiding last-minute distruttive changes and meetings...
5 replies →
Training new employees is still quite a bit lower friction with on-premise work. This obviously depends on the kind of work you do, but in my case the work is sufficiently eclectic that even very smart and experienced people tend to take a long time until they have a good level of understanding of the problem domain.
That doesn't mean I'm against remote work, by the way, we do a lot of it. But we need to be realistic about its limitations.
Easy, you have a mandatory 2 week in office period for training and then move to off site. Whichever employee that will be training you will also come train you. The company can even pay for a coworking space that's in between or closer to trainer so they don't need to migrate for the training.
4 replies →
Remote work can be very effective but it's not for everyone, or at least not all the time.
We have a liberal remote working policy to the point where one of our team works from home almost all the time, whilst at the other end of the spectrum there are people who prefer to be in the office almost all the time, and then everything in between.
I fall somewhere in the middle. A day a week from home, particularly one with few or no meetings, can enable me to get a huge amount done. But I live alone so, whilst I am an introvert, I am not a misanthrope and need to ensure I get enough social contact.
Multiple consecutive days working from home can leave me feeling quite depressed and demotivated. I certainly wouldn't want to do it all the time.
I guess some people are more fit for remote work than others. I certainly miss day to day interaction with people, too.
I've had to do remote probably half dozen days in past couple of years. Here are some things I've observed:
1) As someone who do not regularly work from home, simply I'm not equipped well enough. I don't have extra monitors sitting around at home to hook up my laptop to give myself multiple monitors, for example, so I'm forced to work in a suboptimal setting.
2) Meetings can get tricky (Note: I also do language interpretation) I have mitigated this by hooking up my recording gear, which actually worked pretty decent.
3) Where there are clear objective for the day, it is relatively easy to handle. For anything other like supporting people who managed to show up at work remotely, was certainly harder part.
4) Everything becomes distractions. Something as simple as getting a cup of coffee. In other word I have to make one myself (or go out and get one myself) where at office I would have access to one close by or walk short distance to buy one.
I would probably sustain... maybe a week of remote at the most. Maybe regular remote workers have designed their life to work with it but certainly not for me. (Again, this also depending on the nature of tasks I need to get done.)
Except I don't have a suite of class A glassware, a dewar, liquid nitrogen, and semi-infinite fridge space at home nor have the infrastructure to provide them to all my people
I do miss that stuff.
Well for one, video calls don't really work, even with excellent internet connection. A lot of time is spent just trying to understand what the other person is saying and asking them to repeat or get closer to the mic, or mute themselves because we keep hearing their background noise.
Most importantly, distractions from family members and lack of a boss looking over your shoulder means most people's productivity will be perhaps 20% of normal.
> Well for one, video calls don't really work, even with excellent internet connection
I felt this way for a very long time. Then I switched jobs and realized (1) there are some very good video conferencing tools that work even on 1 bar of LTE (2) a small investment in a camera/headset/microphone goes a long ways.
Most family members can learn to not disurb -- but I do agree that young children are a problem.
Call quality is easy to solve with decent hardware, a quiet office and proper muting (I see this work all the time with 10 to 100 person meetings.)
Yeah, and there is definitely a huge need for tooling remote-first teams, other than yet another chat clients.
We use your standard common video conferencing and screen sharing apps (Skype can do this, but I’m sure there are better options) if we need a quick chat or need to pair program. People just ping each other and agree on a time to sync up (usually immediately if possible , otherwise after your standard human bullshit like ‘grabbing some lunch first’). Its felt pretty natural, but since we are a fully distributed team, we had no choice but to get over the conceptual hang ups of not physically being near the other person.
But I agree, better tools that integrate communication with project management is going to be a good space to try to build something in.
Certain things are just a lot easier when you are together. I have never had as constructive discussions online as I have had when gathered in a room with a whiteboard.
What kind of professional work lines up with the assembly line paradigm?
Ironically am sitting here waiting for some upstream fixes from a team on the other side of the planet before I can even start my work this week, it was meant to be done a few days ago. Perhaps some things are more assembly line than you might imagine.
3 replies →
Web development
2 replies →
For remote work, pretty much anything that's not done on an actual assembly line.
And once everything that doesn't require a physical presence (factory, warehouse jobs and so forth) worked just fine during all of this managers in more traditional companies all over the world are still going to find excuses why work from home is impossible for them. Because most of these guys just want to be able to control their employees.
They will until they don’t, right? These are the same people that will outsource entire teams offshore to complete things when it’s cheaper. There’s a lot of talk about worker productivity in this thread, but I promise you in several years when these companies are able to simply hire cheaper labor outside of tech centers, you won’t hear shit about remote work being unproductive lol.
If the productivity drop is less than the cost decrease and quality level/delivery dates are still met, definitely. I'd love my employer to pay my internet bill and let me work from home more often.
I'd need my employer to cover the bill because I'd need to bypass my IPS's 1tb cap and bump my upload speeds a bit to keep things working well. I do a lot of data transfers and archive management.
Yeah this has been my problem with the argument against remote work. Everyone at my old company always used to talk about how people needed to be face to face to get things done and collaborate. And yet we continued to hire and grow sister teams over in India that we worked with extensively for years, with no problems.
> everything that doesn't require a physical presence (factory, warehouse jobs and so forth)
I don't know what kind of fairy tale world you're from, but you need actual human on site to fix and mend broken machines AND broken operation processes, and also need managers to manage those men.
Also, employees are stakeholders, too, and it's often important to gather various information to gain insights into the operations of the company, so that they can speak up before it's too late. Being able to observe actual processes also helps managers to more precisely understand and analyze operations. (Not that these work as intended in real world, tho.)
> men. people
Otherwise i agree. Having just spent a week on-site at a client, you just notice a lot more problems (or start to understand the details of previously identified problems) that are in your capacity to fix.
Read it again. Those are examples that need a presence.
I expect a huge rise in depression the more people work at home. Some people are fairly isolated and get a needed portion of their interaction quota from work. Without something to fill the defecit they will struggle
Yes, working from home has some drawbacks. That, and also some guilt over the fact that your employer is doing you a favour. I work from home and tend to worry that colleagues think I'm slacking. I don't think they do but it put some extra pressure.
the more people work at home the more likely it is they will find ways to compensate as a group. stay-at-home moms must have been facing these issues forever.
> I expect a huge rise in depression the more people work at home
Offset by a huge fall in depression by those who are introverts and don't function well in open floor plan office environments. Workspace happiness isn't universal.
I am quarantined in a german military base after flying out of Wuhan with a german air force evacuation flight. We have wifi on the base, the backbone is struggling though - 120 bored people I guess...
according to media reports at least two of the 120 people were infected. Were they diagnosed before or after the flight? were they isolated?
we were only checked for symptoms before the flight. Nobody with symptoms was allowed to board (I think everybody boarded though). After arrival everybody went to a medical check and they took a saliva sample that was sent to a lab. So those confirmed cases went to the quarantine quarters first and only got taken out and brought to the hospital the morning after.
2 replies →
I know a person on mainland China and they are bored out of their mind. They are a pilot and have nothing to do, especially since the volume of flights has dropped significantly
Well, that's one job that's tough to do remote, isn't it?
Your office is in a small cockpit miles above earth. Doesn't get much more remote than that.
Hey, drone technology has gotten a lot better
1 reply →
Boredom is underrated.
Seriously, there's going to be some insane creativity in the Chinese economy in the next 1-4 quarters, but we won't see evidence of it for at least a year.
It would be interesting to find out what motivates people when they are the in the office? There was a fad for presence and virtual office type systems in the past and I have heard that some media companies have a permanent group video conference. For me it's just being around people who are busy at their desks that motivates me.
This is awesome. Looking forward to the economics research papers on this in a few months
Not sure awesome is the word I'd use in these circumstances.
The productive part of it is awesome. We got some organisational ideas from trying to stop people dying before. Checklists, triage, and justification by data visualisation just off the top of my head, but I'm sure there was more.
2 replies →
This is absolutely NOT a good thing. Or 'awesome'. You cant teach a class full of elementary schoolers 'from home'. You cannot manufacture electronics 'from home'. This is going to have lasting, major effects on the worlds economy. I'm personally selling all my index fund stock tomorrow morning.
You’re too late. The expected impact of this event is already priced in. Unless you foresee the impacts being much worse than the few lost weeks, don’t change now. The sell-off you wanted to avoid already happened over the last week.
1 reply →
> You cant teach a class full of elementary schoolers 'from home.'
Why not? Kids seem perfectly willing to sit in front of screens — they would probably be perfectly willing to sit in front of screens on a group chat, learning from a teacher and interacting with their friends.
> You cannot manufacture electronics 'from home.'
A robot factory can! Granted, that switch won't be so great for the human workers who used to do that job.
2 replies →
...or we might find that it's not that big a deal to miss a few weeks of work or school so long as everyone knows why and understands it's for the greater good.
> I'm personally selling all my index fund stock tomorrow morning.
... from home
Team building, wining and dining are resource intensive activities as it is, and we would do well to adopt WFH more to save the environment too. Replace Coronavirus threat with the threat of environmental destruction and you get similar solutions.
Does the threat of coronavirus really justify all this media coverage and fear?
Don't think about it as _the_ coronavirus. Think of it as _a new virus_ and things start to make more sense. Over the next 100 years _a new virus_ is likely going to develop that spreads quickly and is lethal. When a new one comes up it's hard to tell initial how it spreads, how fast it spreads, and how lethal it is. For now, I think it's unlikely that the coronavirus will kill all that many people. For now, I think more people should just get the flu shot and not worry about coronavirus. But I'll update my opinion if the spread and death toll seem to worsen.
As an aside, stopping pandemics is on of the main things that Bill Gates is passionate about.
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/Shattuck-Lecture
High lethality and high virulence are opposed to each other. Most of the people who have died from coronavirus have been older people with weaker immune systems.
For coronavirus, it doesn't necessarily have to be the death rate as of this moment that should cause worry. Coronavirus can cause ARDS, described here: https://youtu.be/okg7uq_HrhQ
Treating ARDS in a handful of cases isn't so bad. It's treating ARDS in hundreds of thousands of people that's very very bad.
Hospitals can quickly become full and hospitals also rely on supply chains for materials, which would also become overwhelmed.
I'm not saying panic is the right thing to do, because it isn't, but what I am saying is that the quarantines aren't excessive and there's a reason why governments are paying attention.
Not by itself, but because China is never transparent with numbers, and because they quarantined millions of people, they have sparked a panic.
If the death rate is really 2%, and if it is a contagious as it seems...
As a MechE, I'm always super jealous of my Software Engineer counterparts in terms of work from home. I know a bunch of teams are actually heavily recommended to work from home at least once a week.
Grass is always greener. As a software engineer who works 100% remotely, I’m always jealous of engineering roles that involve hardware.
Definitely a lot of upsides in being a MechE. Making physical stuff is really fulfilling and using really expensive equipment is fun. If your hands are itching to make something on the side, I highly recommend 3D printers! They're really fun to play with and the cost barrier is pretty low nowadays (like the Prusa Mini which is ~$400).
1 reply →
100% remote swe. I don't design hardware, but the company does, and somehow prototypes hop into a cardboard box and get themselves hauled to my door. I could imagine working with schematics and drawings remotely.
2 replies →
I'm also a SWE who mostly works remote. I get tired of being in my house. Sometimes it feels like I'm trapped. I don't have a car so I don't really get out much or go far or travel much.
2 replies →
Hmm, my wife is ME and I'm SWE. She works from home but I can't.
Note I wouldn't want her job for anything. She has to deal with suppliers from all over the world, which means working ~24/6 (plus a seventh day to get her own work done). And has the generous "unlimited" vacation that translates as "no" vacation, unlike software companies that (generally) encourage you to take advantage of it. And makes midwest salary while living on west coast.
I'm on a similar boat (definitely not as bad as your wife's situation though). I feel like the unlimited vacation is so much more unfavorable to hardware engineers. It seems unprofessional to take vacation in the middle of a project but our projects are so long to begin with. This plus the fact we're always fighting fires because one mistake in planning can really screw up the schedule. Not sure where your wife works but hardware at FAANGs aren't too bad (minus crunch time near product release). Possible change for your wife if she's interested.
2 replies →
There is a downside to this - there are no clear work hours boundaries. My father who is a MechE is annoyed that I am often running to my laptop to answer mails, or to code etc beyond a fixed 8-9 hr in a day.
Btw my bachelors was in Mech too :-)
If you make clear boundaries, there are clear boundaries. If you ignore all work emails outside of your working hours, the problem is "solved" (ideally don't have work emails etc. on any device you use outside of "work hours")
If you are working with robotics, the software engineer still have to come in to test their software on the actually hardware.
Software engineers may have simulators to allow testing SW at home, but mechanical engineers also have their 3D modeling and finite element analysis that they can do at home. Oh, and redlines and pushing PLM paper work should be doable at home.
I'm not saying its one-to-one, but MEs and SEs in robotics both have things that can and cannot be done remotely.
I know a MechE working as a MechE who works 100% remotely. But his job is 100% CAD. I can share more details privately...
I'm super interested in this! My job is pretty CAD heavy but the stuff I work on can get pretty big too. Can you elaborate using the email in my profile?
1 reply →
I'm a MechE in aerospace, and work from home once a week. Many people in my company's design office do it.
You shouldn’t be too jealous because in the long run this means devs will have to compete globally skill-set wise and of course compensation wise.
So far their compensation is a lot higher than mechanical engineers though, especially in the US. And US software engineers are paid a lot higher than in other countries, so that effect is unseen for now.
Somebody has to actually make physical stuff. At least food, water, and utilities. More if this goes on.
food, utilities can be sterilized with gamma radiation, water with UV radiation. I am thinking of making a battery backpack for UV LED sterilization of air, so that it is durable and reusable, as mask production is not keeping up with demand, and they are roughly single-use items...
People who can prove they have had the virus and recovered will be in demand.
while in Silicon Valley we'll be coming into our modern freshly remodeled no expense spared creativity and collaboration inducing open floors with energy efficient weak AC&ventilation and waiting until somebody brings it in ...
Beijing authorities require companies to extends for a week unless the company is either critical industries or can fully work-from-home. My company started to fully work-from-home from today, for at least 2 weeks.
This experiment is massive, industries usually move forward only when it's mandatory. I believe this is a great chance that would make people see a lot of professions could be handled quite well remotely, and face-to-face is not that mandatory.
Also, some off-topic info/experiences in case anyone wonders - yesterday I was back from San Francisco to Beijing, here's what I saw:
1. Almost every Chinese I saw during the trip wares a mask. In SFO airport, during the flight, Beijing airport, and on the street. Not many people wear gloves. One guy even wears goggles. I wore an N95 mask and vinyl gloves (couldn't find surgical gloves, and masks are sold out for a lot of pharmacies) for the whole trip (like 15 hours), not the most pleasant experience but acceptable.
2. I filled in two additional forms on the flight which asked if I have been to Hubei (the province which Wuhan located in). One from the custom authority and one from Beijing authority, but the forms are almost identical.
3. When I tried to take a lift, I found Didi (Uber/Lyft counterpart) requires every driver and passenger to wear a mask or everyone has the right to reject and report others if they don't. I guess would I have to take the metro if I didn't buy a mask in the US, but I'm also not sure if the metro staff would let me in if that was the case. Simply put, there are tons of public places that reject people that don't wear masks, it seems to be a very hard time for people who are unfortunately couldn't buy/afford overpriced masks.
4. There are people on the street, but very few. It was the last day of the holiday, in prior years it should be crowded already because people migrate back from every province to Beijing.
5. When I back to my apartment, I found almost every apartment would have security guards stop visitors from entering the apartment, for those who live here requires to show a paper from the apartment to enter freely. Rumor says there are even apartments lockdown themselves that people cannot go out, I'm not sure if it's true.
6. Although Beijing is always easy to buy everything online, food delivery choices only have very few options left for now. Not sure if it would back to normal after the holiday ends. Other than food and medical supplies, things haven't changed much. And also delivery guys cannot enter the apartment, so people have to go outside the apartment to get the delivery.
7. For the rest of the week, I'm going to live on instant noodles and some simple foods. Wish me good luck =)
Thanks for sharing, good luck.
What are cultural outlets that the Chinese use to deal with this type of suffering/anxiety/sadness?
There aren't many. Traditionally, Chinese people would rather endure. There are a lot of families play mahjong all day long, but it's unfortunate for those who don't have 4 players in the family - most of the public places to play mahjong have been shutdown.
For young people, their interests are more westernized, varies from person to person so that depends. It's more introverted people favored when people cannot go outside.
Luckily, the Internet plays a centric role in people's daily life, at least in cities and towns.
For the countryside, villages lockdown themselves by rejecting strangers and far relatives, but villagers can still move around.
Meanwhile in the United States I continue to have to share a desk with someone from another shift, all of us do, and as I was typing this I heard 2 different people sneeze, one immediately in front of me that turned in my direction and sneezed towards the floor without covering. Which he's done several times a day for a week.
Fun fun fun.
Stocked up on several containers of wipes and several things of hand sanitizer this weekend. Normally not my thing but the office has already had a stomach bug and a flu blaze through the bulk of 180~ people this year, I'll spend some money for peace of mind while this Coronavirus is doing its thing.
Eh, my father is a vice-manager of a company's information department. Damn he's been struggling with getting hundreds of people to work remotely for more than 2 weeks. I'm not familiar with those stuff but sounds like he's trying to build a solution with MS RDP and/or Citrix's tech. He's been on his phone for hours and hours these days... Ruined our Chinese New Year if you'd ask me.
Maybe those who WFH during this situation will develop some empathy for full-time remote workers ... because for damn sure most of them have none. There are some issues that are obvious and easily addressed, like leaving stakeholders out of a meeting entirely ("couldn't find a room on short notice"). There are others that are hard to notice unless you're subject to them all the time.
* A VPN that's OK for short-term use, but unreliable enough to cause multiple flow disruptions every single day.
* Extremely slow (and often more contentious) document/code reviews because people aren't as comfortable with written communication as ftf.
* Losing every commit race because of the above, and having to spend more time than anyone else handling tricky merges.
* Being in effective listen-only mode in meetings because of constant interruption and side chatter (or not even able to hear if half the participants are loudly eating lunch the entire time).
* IDEs that lose their ability to navigate code because the connection to the cross-referencing engine can't survive high latency. (BTW this is related to having a giant monorepo, which is itself a bit of a remote-hostile choice.)
There are many more. Working from home has its advantages, but doing so in an office-first environment can be frustrating too. Maybe those who experience some of that frustration for a few days will at least stop criticizing others for things that aren't their fault.
I think it's going to have the opposite effect.
Because everyone isn't unaccustomed to working from home - they are going to be tremendously inefficient, and will later assume that all those WFH employees are also therefor chronically inefficient.
You may wonder why but some School in a sense no choice. The university worldwide needed an exam result and that is a strange thing now the exam will be done in March. In Hong Kong basically the turmoil meant it would be very bad for the result for the young kids.
But not all needed. Take a rest and stay healthy more important.
I'm planning on moving back to HK this May so I hope this has all blown over by then. I just heard my boss managed to get back to HK a day before they stopped people leaving the village he was in. Now he has to work from home for 2 weeks before he's allowed back to the office.
A shameless self-plug on my thoughts on working from home -
https://medium.com/@bossingaround/working-from-home-is-great...
I wonder how many people are using coronavirus as a convenient excuse to stay home to nurse their superbowl hangover. :D
Experiments are only as good as their preparation and setting, and so this would struggle to be a good experiment.
How are exports from china impacted by this?
For example most products on Amazon are coming from China. How is it not impacted?
Wuhan is a commercial center, not an industrial one. It also is not a major port.
I guess companies will update their sick leave policies too. Could be interesting.
I wonder if ZOOM and peers may be an investment hedge against a wider outbreak?
flu seasons are the worst, everywhere. we should either move a do-nothing holiday to overlap with flu season, or make it 'worldwide work from home weeks'
What I’d like to see is the removal of terrorism alerts
And replace them with a flu & pandemic risk scoring matrix.
As the risk score increases, recommended behaviours are emphasised.
Not too indifferent from news including pollen and UV risk as well as traffic congestion.
Just add public health alerts and get rid of terror alerts.
Keep the alerts and recommended behaviours clear, repetitive, simple, and timely.
Whole universities are setting up their equipment properly from remote study and forcing lecturers to learn how to use it.
Which is also interesting.
Working from home is incredibly bad for your mental health of course. Same as studying one assumes.
> Working from home is incredibly bad for your mental health of course.
Why _of course_? Do you have any evidence to support that? I'm sure both remote and office methodologies have their negatives on mental health.
S/he was ironic. All the people study at home without any problem.
> both remote
Not discussing remote. As per article co-hosts are in danger of closing.
I see working from home being different from Hikikomori, but I think it has the same issues.
1 reply →
Its bad if you don't have an active social life and/or are doing it exclusively from home. The WFH arrangements mostly being discussed are more about working 1-2 days a week from home.
> A 2015 study from Stanford University in California found that productivity among call-center employees at Chinese travel agency Ctrip went up by 13% when they worked from home due to fewer breaks and more comfortable work environments.
This study which they (And everyone repetitively) quotes, was fulltime.
But part time and for periods when other things in someones life are stressful, I agree it can make sense. Same for part time study.
"The flat wage <> averaging around ¥1,300 per month. The bonus portion depended on the individual’s monthly performance and averaged about ¥1,000 ($160) per month."
I'm dubious why this study keeps getting quoted, it's not great to compare too.
I've learned that VR can eliminate some of the stir craziness you get.
Work-from-home is not a good thing. Meeting people in a company is something important.
Coronavirus is far more infectious than sars. Numbers infected are likely 100k or more. This will become a pandemic. I can’t see how they can contain this. What we don’t know yet, is the mortality rate. Yes, we know the Chinese are hiding the deaths.