So How Amenable is Your Job to Working From Home?
Mates,
As more and different businesses and schools close, this virus thing might have us all 'sheltering in place', away from work for a while, not just a snow day or two. hopefully we flatten the curve and push down the total number of folks infected. I know that some of you do a substantial amount of 'at home' type of work, but others, not so much.
So the question is: How amenable is your job to working remotely, if at all? How are you accomplishing that and how long do those of us who don't normally work from home think they can keep the ball rolling in that fashion?
Stay safe and try to find the silver linings about all of this,
XM
I have an office job that already allows working from home (on approval.) So no big transition here.
The big question for me is school. I am taking a class that is heavy on presentations, lectures & discussions. The professor is not very good with computers & tried to avoid them. The school is currently shut down on a one-week break to figure out how to transition all classes to distance learning. How this class resumes on Thursday, I have no idea.
Max Headroom will be your new instructor
My only question now is: Can you gets worker's comp if you accidentally punch your refrigerator while playing a VR boxing game during work hours?
Asking for... um... a friend?
It's not. I'm an interventional radiologist and I do procedures all day. I can't work from home. We're cutting our schedule down to just patients who need something done soon as opposed to done whenever.
I'm a public school teacher in Wayne County. I'm still receiving a paycheck no matter what. We were told to provide weekly emails or Google classroom posts to students that introduce ourselves, provide a syllabus, and links to articles and videos to engage the students in course content. We are not allowed to grade anything or give assessments unless they are formative (not for credit).
My weekend/summer job is serving/bartending at a gastropub, that's a different story as of today.
I'm in the office today, but that makes me one of about 10% at most. I fully expect the company will switch from "may" to "must" shortly. We have a cafeteria and might now be the only place with food service for miles.
Our cafeteria closed at 3 and won't be opening any time soon.
At around noon I told my boss it was let me work from home, or no work at all. They agreed.
What pisses me off is that my job is such that I almost never have to actually be in the office, but there's one EVP in my reporting chain that hates people working from home. So she fucks everything up and will probably be directly responsible for the spread of the virus.
Mad hatter, I gotta say, I didn't take for one that is worried about germs and viruses. I figured with your lifestyle, and penchant for sex workers, you've probably been exposed to just about everything out there.
I'm in the office too for the foreseeable future - we apparently "have to set a good example"
Whatever the fuck that means...
When I'm not traveling, I'm always working from home. Company officially asked us to cancel all travel yesterday. Our annual sales meeting in early May is on the chopping block.
In terms of lifestyle, the only difference will be working with the wife and kids here all day.
Unfortunately, our fiscal year ends 3/31, and I still had a sizable chunk in my pipeline waiting to close.
But as long as they don't realize, "hey, we don't actually need a field sales presence after all!" I'm good. And fortunate.
Set the dictator for life...
I've just been shut down for the rest of the month, trying to line up some freelance work in the meantime. Will still be meeting with clients but not around a bunch of crowds. Online work is possible in my field, but I'm too set in my ways to try and figure that stuff out.
I work in the Seattle area, which is the epicenter of this Coronavirus.
Office has told anyone who can work from home to do so, including me. We are going to be working from home until at least March 27th, although I bet it will be longer than that. I haven't been in the office since February 19th.
Almost every office company around me has been encouraging people to work from home.
I'm a registered nurse so not at all. I'll most likely work until I get it and then I'll be home under quarantine until I fend it off.
Godspeed.
Nurses are Saints
I always tell them this. I also add that they're angels of mercy, visions of loveliness, and that the entire medical system would collapse if not for their expertise.
Of course, I'll say anything to a woman holding a sharp instrument who could make my life a living hell if she chose to.
Seriously. They are part of my customer base and I have watched them deal patiently all day long with other people’s pain and misery and then go home and take care of their family.
I feel you...I'm a hospice nurse..however I'm a manger, so in the office.. At least until until staff gets sick...
I have an "information economy"/software job, so our office is transitioning into WFH pretty seamlessly (most of our business team is remote already). I do not envy those of you with young kids who have nowhere to go and are also newly WFH in tight quarters.
March 16th, 2020 at 10:32 PM ^
Same here. I have a small team, a couple products, servers and their minders are elsewhere, most users are in North America. I've been 95% remote and virtual for a long time, and don't see much of the other 5% as effective use of resources. Most of my work has been geo-liberated since about '96. So not much disruption there. So far.
Thing is, probably be lots of people on the trout streams over the next month as the water wakes up. If you used to think "Don't people work anymore" before...
My co-workers are in Seattle, my boss and his group is in London, US headquarters is in New Jersey, and I manage developers in India. So remote work is pretty much the norm for me...
My last job was in IT as a software product director, so I was fully virtual dealing with developers and suppliers across the USA. That was a nice aspect of the job. Morning commute was grabbing a mug of coffee and walking into my home office. The dogs were my only distraction as they wanted to go out and chase the squirrels every 30 minutes.
I’ve been retired for a few years now and can’t help but think my timing was spot on given what’s been going on in my life and in this crazy world.
Do you happen to work for a learning technology company? My company has headquarters in London and New Jersey, and offices in India, so I'm curious is we happen to be with the same company.
And my position is already remote, so it's the norm for me too.
I'm a full time stay home parent so... it's a nightmare.
On the bright side, my little maple tree farm had a good yield this year. Our 8 maples made enough syrup to get us to Christmas.
Heart surgeon. Not so amenable.
Edit: Or I could have them come to my house. I’ll have to tell Mrs. Foam that the dining room table will be occupied for at least the next 8 weeks.
I've been essentially full-time working from home since 2007 so I'm fortunate in that regard, basically no change to my work setup.
Real estate broker. I can do a lot of it from home, but sometimes I'm simply going to have to go in to properties with other humans. Did that 3 times today.
Haven't shaken a hand since last Wednesday.
Same here. Unfortunately people don’t usually buy houses without seeing them so there’s going to be some level of human interaction.
March 16th, 2020 at 11:02 PM ^
Ironically, the deal I put together over the weekend was "sight unseen".
Are people even out looking at houses with the shut down? I’d think real estate would slow way down
yes,
my wife is in real estate in west michigan and she showed 2 houses tonight and potentially will be writing an offer on one.
With that being said, it has been insanely fucking slow currently after last year she doubled her previous years income.. It is a lot on myself when i have a medicore average american income, but i do have a side business online that made half what i made in my day job last year. This year is trending higher again which is good. But fuck having a significant other in real estate is tough right now.
I'm a member of a small engineering team and several members of my immediate team are located in Europe so it doesn't make sense for my employer to require me to come to the office. I've been fully remote since I moved to this team about 6 months ago.
My employer was running out of space on our department's floor of the building anyway, so my manager pitched me on the suggestion and it just made sense to me. I don't know that I could back now to having a job that requires me to commute, though. I'm essentially getting back an hour and a half of my own time each day and I don't want to give it back.
March 16th, 2020 at 10:44 PM ^
Commuting is the worst. I've briefly had some miserable commutes in my life. Walnut Creek/Emeryville in the East Bay, I-75 in Atlanta, Estes Park to the Denver Tech Center. The more of that kind of thing this virus kills, the better off we will be.
I am a lawyer, so working from home is pretty common. At my firm, all attorneys and staff have been sent home indefinitely. I wish my Citrix had a 2 screens option, but I actually prefer working from home to the hour-long commute each way every day.
I'm a professor and I'm not teaching this semester, so it's no problem for me. Though my productivity sucks at home.
I spend about 25% of my time in a SCIF. The problem is I rarely know when I’m going to be called in there. So my answer is “not very amenable.”
I got a meeting notice today for my department (~50 people) to meet in a conference room and discuss our covid-19 response. Five minutes later the boss figured out what he had done and canceled the meeting. We’re being told, IF you can work at home, you WILL work at home. There’s probably 400 people on my floor here at the cubicle farm.
XM’s actual farm >>>>> my cubicle farm
I also work in a SCIF, and there is just no taking that home. I do have some corporate odds and ends I could do from home, but nothing substantial. So I'll be spending most of my time in an office building built for ~10,000 people. Maybe 50% are working from home.
I'm finding out today. FWIW I feel bad for my wife-our 15 year old has to stay home now (schools closed in Ohio for at LEAST 3 weeks) and now me. And I'm semi-retired anyways (only work 3 days a week) so not a huge change schedule wise for me being home.
My son is taking the basement and I'm taking the kitchen. Gonna be interesting that's for sure.
mGrowOld, I didn't realize you lived in Ohio. I'm sorry.
it gets worse: he's a browns fan.
March 17th, 2020 at 12:51 AM ^
Now that's just piling on the poor man.
well i'm a self-confessed lions fan, so i can say that about others. lions fans are the kings/queens of self-abuse.
I'm a web developer, so this reminds me of my freelance kids, except I didn't have five kids back then. The issue is that the entire staff is working from home and most of them don't know how to handle this. So it's lots and lots of meetings to get on the same page.
I'm in the tech industry and we do this a lot already although being in management I don't do it that much. I'm still getting used to it as we are on Day 2 of mandatory office closure.
I'm a project manager for a low voltage company, so it's a Yes and No for me. I can work from home on my laptop and phone. It's not as easy as sitting at my desk with three monitors, but can be done. The No is I will meet technicians at the office in the morning to go over jobs and I spend probably 50% of my time visiting jobsites. Which is why I have a 2016 vehicle with 154,000 miles on it.
I can do a lot of things from home, but I will have to duck into the office from time to time. My employer is saying that we have to substantiate an eight hour work day in order to get paid. Good luck with that
I'm a management consultant, so well-versed in and capable of working remotely. Biggest challenges are things like client workshops and other meetings of any significant length (half/full/multi day) where things are very interactive. I'm very glad we finished our site visits early last week before we hit the initial wave of shutdowns.
My wife, on the other hand, is a pediatric nurse. Obviously not a job you can do remotely. She had a surgery on March 2 and is out of commission for 6 weeks from that date. We're actually thankful that the timing worked out the way it did because she pretty much has to stay home the next month. She feels "survivor's guilt" in the sense of not being able to help her colleagues as they still have to venture out to the hospital to take care of their patients.
Been working from home for almost 20 years, so no change here!
The company I worked for was acquired by a large firm which offered shared office space or a home office. I choose the home office but had small kids and a house with no office. I finished a portion of the basement but it took me several months to put in a window. Adding an egress window made things easier and safer.
We do lots of meetings and use webex, I usually have my camera turned off but it is encouraged - so I have started to turn it on but point it at a zombie figurine rather than my face.