Week 10

[petrea_mitchell]

In addition to the roses, lawn signs are blooming all around the neighborhood, proclaiming the presence of graduating high school seniors in the houses nearby.

Myself, I have a nice long weekend to come to terms with the fact that I'm probably working from home for the long term. The latest word from the CDC is that we can all be a little less paranoid about touching things (though hand-washing is still a good idea, because other diseases still exist) and instead should focus on minimizing the total amount of time we spend around other people. Even with distancing and masks, the longer people are in each others' company, especially indoors, especially with a lot of talking, singing, or shouting or going on, the more virus gets transmitted, it turns out. Which sounds to me like the end of the nonessential office.

The tech industry has been heading in this direction for some time, and, indeed, may be long overdue for it. I remember a few years ago, a complaint was circulating about the big tech players' insistence on trying to drag ever more people into the housing insanity of the SF Bay Area that ran something like

1995: The Information Superhighway will allow anyone to work from anywhere, anytime
2015: Must be willing to relocate to San Francisco

Now everyone has decided this isn't so critical after all. Facebook has told its regular employees to work from home until the end of the year and think about whether they really ever want to come back to the office. Twitter has said the hell with it and made everyone permanently remote. Smaller companies are following suit. The pressure may be off the Bay Area soon in a big way. SF Gate reports that two-thirds of tech workers would consider moving away if they could work from home.

Management at my company has only said so far that they intend for us to be among the last wave of people coming back to work in the office. But I think that by now they must have looked at the cost of office space vs. beefing up the VPN.

At any rate, I don't expect to be back in the office anytime soon, so I'm looking at my options for a more permanent working-from-home setup. First up, I should really free up the card table for cards and boardgames again. Today I went poking through the listings for desks and tables on a couple of sites and eventually concluded that I'm going to have to go into a store with my laptop to try some out. I've found candidates of the right width and depth, but they're all a few inches higher than I'd like to have my hands resting. There are a few with big enough keyboard trays that they might hold a laptop, but I'd have to go and check in person.

I don't really want to be around a lot of shoppers after yesterday's run to the farmers' market. At the grocery store nearly everyone is staying focused and making an effort to keep their distance, but people at the farmers' market seemed very unclear on the whole concept.

Comments

[kevin_standlee]

I think I've been very lucky in that I've been a permanent work-from-home engineer for years no. First our customer decided it wasn't so important that we work on site at their office and told us to go to our warehouse 10 miles away instead. Then my manager and coworkers all moved away and I was transferred to a team that already was mostly work-from-home, and manager at the time told me it was fine to work from home all the time. Now it's down to only a few times a year that I go to the Bay Area, mainly due to non-work commitments and because my work computer seems to like to connect to the company network in the office now and then to make it happy. It's been a great thing for me, and I hope that they don't ever decide something like, "We'd rather have all of our engineers in one building" again.

[petrea_mitchell]

I've always preferred to be in the office because the physical context helps with both keeping me on track during work times and disconnecting at non-work times. But sitting in a comfortable chair, with my spare monitors that I was allowed to bring home for the duration, rather than hunched over my laptop on the couch, I have to say, it's been a lot easier than I expected to maintain the separation between work and life.

[delosharriman]

I have several thoughts on this. The first is that I don't see it as leading to disintegration of cities, as projected by many SF authors of the 1950s, because there are too many benefits to living in an urban center, notably proximity to all the things which can't be tele-worked. The advantage of being able to get a plumber when your pipe bursts in the middle of the night cannot be denied! In fact it may improve the economic vitality of cities, because there will be less pressure to give big tax breaks in order to attract large office-type employers. What I would see is a greater emphasis on quality of life.

Another is that this represents a further shifting of costs from employer to employee. We've seen a lot of this, for example, "credentialism" in hiring, which is not only a way of shifting training costs, but also in effect of having the employee indemnify the employer, who can disclaim responsibility for evaluating whether the person hired for the job was really suitable for it. On the other hand, the reduction of transportation costs, as well as time lost in transit, might well make the employee come out ahead anyway.

A third is that there is probably substantial benefit to the kind of collaboration which can take place in an office environment, but that it is very unevenly distributed across (a) fields of work, & (b) types of workplace. Often, making any kind of changes requires forcing the hands of the managers. We shall see what results the experiment returns!

[petrea_mitchell]

I agree with all this-- though I expect the cost-shifting is going to vary from industry to industry, probably with the well-paid tech people coming out ahead again. It's still standard in tech for companies to pay for training, and it's common to provide some equipment to allow for even people who are usually in the office to telecommute occasionally.

[darkoshi]

I'm still struggling to find the best work-from-home desk and chair setup. For a long time, I used a portable rectangular table. Then got an L-shaped desk, as that is more similar to what I have in my cubicle at work. I often sit with my legs crossed, so I wanted the desk to be high enough not to get in the way of my legs. But the desk I bought is slightly too high. I thought I could adjust my chairs higher if necessary, but it turns out that most chairs can't adjust as high as I'd like. There's also the issue of when the chair is too high, the feet don't get enough support, and maybe that contributes to swollen ankles at the end of the day. So yep, having the desk too high isn't good.

If you're considering using a keyboard tray to hold the laptop lower for typing, it might be worthwhile getting an external keyboard and mouse. Then only the keyboard would need to go on the tray. You can also then place the laptop up on a small shelf or stack of books (for example) on top of the desk to position its screen higher and closer to eye-level.

[petrea_mitchell]

Oh yes, the standard monitor riser in use at my workplace was a ream or two of paper that was supposed to be for the printers. :-)