Back to the Office for Tech Workers

[XBoxBoy]

It’s funny. We keep talking about tech workers, but the other day I called a company’s customer service and while I’m on the line with the service rep. I could hear her also telling her kid that she needed to be quiet while mom’s on the phone. I guess she could have brought her kid into work, but I suspect she was working from home. And if you think about it, she’s saving money because she doesn’t need to pay child care, and the company is able to get a low wage worker that they otherwise might not have been able to. I don’t think this work from home thing is just about high paid tech workers.

[Coronita]

[quote=XBoxBoy]It’s funny. We keep talking about tech workers, but the other day I called a company’s customer service and while I’m on the line with the service rep. I could hear her also telling her kid that she needed to be quiet while mom’s on the phone. I guess she could have brought her kid into work, but I suspect she was working from home. And if you think about it, she’s saving money because she doesn’t need to pay child care, and the company is able to get a low wage worker that they otherwise might not have been able to. I don’t think this work from home thing is just about high paid tech workers.[/quote]

It’s also school district employees, who called just a few days ago, and she said she’s not in the office and she’s working from home so it’s best to reach her via email….

[Coronita]

[quote=JPJones]

Jesus, dude. Who hurt you? You say you have no axe to grind, then proceed to grind an axe.

Anyhow, good tech workers are literally irreplaceable right now. The type of shortage we’re seeing isn’t going to correct itself in a year or two, and for that matter, we aren’t even talking tech workers at this point. WFH is a normal part of benefits packages for every white collar job across every industry now. The cat is out of the bag, and smarter business people than us have figured out how much full-time remote work has increased productivity. (SPOILERS: it’s a lot)[/quote]
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[sdrealtor]

[quote=Coronita][quote=XBoxBoy]It’s funny. We keep talking about tech workers, but the other day I called a company’s customer service and while I’m on the line with the service rep. I could hear her also telling her kid that she needed to be quiet while mom’s on the phone. I guess she could have brought her kid into work, but I suspect she was working from home. And if you think about it, she’s saving money because she doesn’t need to pay child care, and the company is able to get a low wage worker that they otherwise might not have been able to. I don’t think this work from home thing is just about high paid tech workers.[/quote]

It’s also school district employees, who called just a few days ago, and she said she’s not in the office and she’s working from home so it’s best to reach her via email….[/quote]

And it’s health care workers also. One family member meets with a therapist over zoom. Another family member just took a work from home job counseling patients with hearing issues.

Much of the mortgage industry is wfh now also. It’s a tech wave but has created many other ripples

[Coronita]

[quote=sdrealtor][quote=Coronita][quote=XBoxBoy]It’s funny. We keep talking about tech workers, but the other day I called a company’s customer service and while I’m on the line with the service rep. I could hear her also telling her kid that she needed to be quiet while mom’s on the phone. I guess she could have brought her kid into work, but I suspect she was working from home. And if you think about it, she’s saving money because she doesn’t need to pay child care, and the company is able to get a low wage worker that they otherwise might not have been able to. I don’t think this work from home thing is just about high paid tech workers.[/quote]

It’s also school district employees, who called just a few days ago, and she said she’s not in the office and she’s working from home so it’s best to reach her via email….[/quote]

And it’s health care workers also. One family member meets with a therapist over zoom. Another family member just took a work from home job counseling patients with hearing issues.

Much of the mortgage industry is wfh now also. It’s a tech wave but has created many other ripples[/quote]

My kid’s tutor service is now over zoom.

[scaredyclassic]

[quote=sdrealtor][quote=Coronita][quote=XBoxBoy]It’s funny. We keep talking about tech workers, but the other day I called a company’s customer service and while I’m on the line with the service rep. I could hear her also telling her kid that she needed to be quiet while mom’s on the phone. I guess she could have brought her kid into work, but I suspect she was working from home. And if you think about it, she’s saving money because she doesn’t need to pay child care, and the company is able to get a low wage worker that they otherwise might not have been able to. I don’t think this work from home thing is just about high paid tech workers.[/quote]

It’s also school district employees, who called just a few days ago, and she said she’s not in the office and she’s working from home so it’s best to reach her via email….[/quote]

And it’s health care workers also. One family member meets with a therapist over zoom. Another family member just took a work from home job counseling patients with hearing issues.

Much of the mortgage industry is wfh now also. It’s a tech wave but has created many other ripples[/quote]

Telemedicine will be commonplace, I don’t think that trend will reverse. My wife’s doing it. It’s very very VERY efficient. Having bodies late and milling about an office slows things down. Obviously some issues will require physical presence, but a shocking number do not.

38x more telehealth encounters than prepandemic…but now stabilizing…

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare-systems-and-services/our-insights/telehealth-a-quarter-trillion-dollar-post-covid-19-reality#:~:text=Telehealth%20utilization%20has%20stabilized%20at,17%20percent%20across%20all%20specialties.

Personally, I’ve met with my therapist over zoom and in person, and for me, in person is much better.

[JPJones]

Accountants, engineers, helpdesk/service desk, bankers, basically every desk job I know of. They’re all working from home if it’s practical and they want to. If their employers didn’t allow it, they found jobs with employers that did.

On the other side of that coin, there are people that don’t want to work remotely, and that’s great, too. There are plenty of jobs for both types. So, while I don’t see remote work going away, I don’t see in-office jobs going away, either. Having both available is healthy and ultimately keeps more people happily employed. The key is not to force your preference on others.

[Coronita]

[quote=scaredyclassic]

Telemedicine will be commonplace, I don’t think that trend will reverse. My wife’s doing it. It’s very very VERY efficient. Having bodies late and milling about an office slows things down. Obviously some issues will require physical presence, but a shocking number do not.[/quote]

Actually, this is just starting and scratching the surface.

I’ve had a few startups that reached out to me asking me if I was interested in running their mobile app group. There’s a few interesting concepts, all with the idea of no longer requiring in person contact. I’m not sure I agree with all the ideas will work but…it’s interesting to see some people thinking about this. Most of them are in the medical space..

1) Remote, self service hearing diagnostic and hear aid kit.

This startup is building a remote configurable hearing diagnostic and hear aid system. The concept is to allow some elderly in the rural/remote community with limited mobility and unable to reach hear specialistics to have access to top hearing specialists that live elsewhere (IE urban areas)… Their prototype involves shipping a medical hearing diagnostic kit to the person, and than providing a remote management console to a hearing specialist elsewhere to run the hearing tests one normally would need to see in person to do. They also are working on a hearing aid that can also be configured and tuned remotely. Part of the “kit” besides the medical device is a smartphone shipped with the package specifically customized and built just to run the the tests and configure the hearing aid. Interesting concept.

2) Second company is creating remote diagnostic tools to help parents diagnose if their developing kid has a higher chance of autism. Some of this is to capture day-to-day behavior of the kid and also some integratio to daycare etc. Supposedly the POC is being tested with part of the USAF. I didn’t quiet understand how things work, and how much of it was real and to be done, but whatver.

3) Third company was a startup that does remote diabetic management. (No ,it wasn’t Insulet, Dexcom, or Solara).

#1 and #3 had their Series A VC funding. #2 was funded by angel investors not yet at the Series A yet.

There’s a lot of energy and money being spent on remote medical diagnostic. It’s not just about being confined to home due to a pandemic they are trying to solve. A lot of these ideas came up because the pandemic caused people to think “what can we do with technology if you cannot physically be in close contact with someone else”…..And then the application of that is being applied to people who do not have easy access to good medical care (IE rural people etc)…

I think these ideas are a lot more exciting than companies like Peloton that make a connected exercise bike. I wouldn’t consider that really “tech”….lol.

That said, some of the medical diagnostic-ish stuff is also being applied to things like sports medicine/training. For example, glucose monitoring companies are starting to branch out to sports medicine/fitness training where some of the future products are to help athletics monitor their glucose levels, etc as part of a training regimen. I believe some of these devices probably don’t need as rigorous clearance from the FDA/etc…

[spdrun]

Personally, I’ve met with my therapist over zoom and in person, and for me, in person is much better.

And if telemedicine becomes normalized, insurance companies will ram it down people’s craws in the name of “efficiency” and “cost saving”, even though it’s inferior for some people like yourself. Not all people even have a safe place to meet “virtually” with a therapist, away from nosy family, significant others, or roommates.

[spdrun]

This startup is building a remote configurable hearing diagnostic and hear aid system. The concept is to allow some elderly in the rural/remote community with limited mobility and unable to reach hear specialistics to have access to top hearing specialists that live elsewhere (IE urban areas)…

Two things:

(1) What’s to stop the companies from pushing laws that allow the specialists to be outsourced abroad or automated away? This sounds like a jobkiller long-term.

(2) People who need hearing aids should also have a checkup for other organic causes of hearing loss … a hearing aid could be hiding the real problem that’s damaging hearing long-term.

[spdrun]

The key is not to force your preference on others.

The problem is that employers will start pushing from-home work on people who DON’T want it (like myself – I’ve learned to LOATHE working from home full-time) if the industry allows for it. Why? It saves them on office costs, and if people have all the tools needed to work from home, there are suddenly no boundaries between home and work. Welcome to 24/7 on-call Hell.

[Coronita]

[quote=spdrun]

This startup is building a remote configurable hearing diagnostic and hear aid system. The concept is to allow some elderly in the rural/remote community with limited mobility and unable to reach hear specialistics to have access to top hearing specialists that live elsewhere (IE urban areas)…

Two things:

(1) What’s to stop the companies from pushing laws that allow the specialists to be outsourced abroad or automated away? This sounds like a jobkiller long-term.

(2) People who need hearing aids should also have a checkup for other organic causes of hearing loss … a hearing aid could be hiding the real problem that’s damaging hearing long-term.[/quote]

If you want, you can talk to the company. They couldnt afford me so I didn’t follow up with the details of how it works…

I try not to be a Debbie Downer when someone trying to do something new in tech. There’s enough of that on piggington.

OOAL!!!

[JPJones]

[quote=spdrun]

The key is not to force your preference on others.

The problem is that employers will start pushing from-home work on people who DON’T want it (like myself – I’ve learned to LOATHE working from home full-time) if the industry allows for it. Why? It saves them on office costs, and if people have all the tools needed to work from home, there are suddenly no boundaries between home and work. Welcome to 24/7 on-call Hell.[/quote]

Yeah, that’s tricky. Since my wife switched to remote 2 years ago, we’ve had to get a lot more strict about setting boundaries with work. She used to check Slack occasionally while idling on the couch outside of working hours. Little things like that were cut out pretty early on, else she ended up doing a lot of little work sessions during family time. If you aren’t good at setting those boundaries, remote work might not be right for you.

[JPJones]

*stupid double post

[Coronita]

[quote=JPJones][quote=spdrun]

The key is not to force your preference on others.

The problem is that employers will start pushing from-home work on people who DON’T want it (like myself – I’ve learned to LOATHE working from home full-time) if the industry allows for it. Why? It saves them on office costs, and if people have all the tools needed to work from home, there are suddenly no boundaries between home and work. Welcome to 24/7 on-call Hell.[/quote]

Yeah, that’s tricky. Since my wife switched to remote 2 years ago, we’ve had to get a lot more strict about setting boundaries with work. She used to check Slack occasionally while idling on the couch outside of working hours. Little things like that were cut out pretty early on, else she ended up doing a lot of little work sessions during family time. If you aren’t good at setting those boundaries, remote work might not be right for you.[/quote]

There’s a tradeoff between flexibility and taking calls outside of your timezone. We’ve had a few years to refine things but it’s pretty simple.

We have a planned short morning “standup” meeting at 9am PST in the morning and a meeting in the afternoon at 2pm PST. If you’re not in the PST timezone, you either have to be available at those times OR you must have someone covering for you.

You are not to respond to slack or team messages past your 6pm in your timezone, unless you are happen to be the engineer on call for a production launch week. At which there’s a rotation schedule across US timezone and asia, so at most you’ll be on call for +2hrs from 6pm until the other team takes over.

Managers and above are exempt and expected to attend corporate meetings as early 7am PST when needed because there are times you’ll need to get on a call with the east coast team… The flipside is there are days that things get quiet by the time it’s 3pm PST (because everyone on the east coast it’s already 6pm). So some days, I’m off by 3:30pm PST, just in time to volunteer for my kid’s robotics team.

No one is allowed to ring personal mobile numbers. Everyone is expected to message in slack or teams, and if you’re on call, you need to have slack/teams on your phone and logged in.

If you don’t respond during hours, don’t check in your code or submit a PR or show up for a code review, design meeting. You will get tarred and feathered over slack and teams by your teammates and get shit on by them.

Managers and above have learned here to use the “Scheduled messages” after hours, if they want to put something in a slack channel that is not meant to be actioned upon until the next business day. Before, I wasn’t doing this, people were thinking I was expecting a response off-hours and finally people complained to me about it. I didn’t expect people to respond off-hours.. I just didn’t want forget and posted it in the slack channel meant for tomorrow.

My philosophy is don’t be a dick to people on your team. And one day if you end up working for one of them, (hopefully) you won’t work for a dick.

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