Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are asking staff to work from home

This is a massive accidental experiment on the effectiveness of fully remote teams. Most of these companies are fairly reticent to have even a few workers remote, let alone entire teams&#x2F;orgs.<p>It&#x27;ll be interesting to see if teams push for something closer to full remote wherever it worked well (or if some employees will want it, having not realized what it was like).<p>Plausibly teams that it works well for will have greater ammunition to push for it, since they have the past experience with it.

My employer dislikes remote work, many will disagree, but I’ll explain why…<p>The company makes video games and as you can probably guess being creative is very important. Working from home reduces the creativity of every employee not just because the existing tools for telecommute are insufficient to create a good work environment but also because it prevents people from socializing with spontaneity. Add to this the fact that many of the game developers and designers need special hardware <i>(different game consoles, VPN routers, high speed Internet, interactive pen displays, additional software licenses, etc)</i> that the company would have to buy for every single person to maintain the quality and development speed they have from working on-site.<p>The founders were forced, due to CORVID-19, to implement an emergency protocol in case we have to move all operations off-site. The IT department was already tasked to setup VPN access for all employees, to buy a bunch of expensive equipment, to spend countless of hours training senior programmers and artists in the arts of online meetings, network troubleshooting, activation of software licenses and who knows what else.<p>I worked for a remote-first company for roughly five years and it was great, but the business was completely different. My team was responsible for the provisioning and management of different cloud services, in fact all our products were Software as a Service (SaaS) so having a reliable Internet connection and a good enough computer was enough to do our job including leadership, management, marketing, engineering, sales, support, etc.<p>I cannot see this happening in a game studio, it just doesn’t work. I may be wrong but I think there is not a single game studio in the industry with a fully remote work policy. If there are, I bet their success cannot compare with studios of the same size working all on-site.

Dropbox is too[1] and what I like about this is that their main motive (I think, based on the kind of person I’ve seen Drew being) isn’t just not their employees getting sick, or it spreading inside Dropbox, but also to make their tiny contribution to it spreading less in the world in general. And in the article it mentions it’s only in Seattle that these other companies are instituting work from home, and it seems like it’s only because some of their employees are already infected! If everyone in the world that could would just work from home for a while and limit physical contact, then the trajectory of the spread would be much different and maybe we could nip it in the bud.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;drewhouston&#x2F;status&#x2F;1235747829307437056?s=21" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;drewhouston&#x2F;status&#x2F;1235747829307437056?s...</a>

As an Italian Milan-based employee of one these corporations, I have been working from home for the last 2 weeks with personal plans to work from home at least until the end of March. I really appreciate the flexibility and feel extremely privileged to be able to do this. Unfortunately not everyone can or has the company infrastructure (e.g. laptops) to be able to work from home. I hope this shock snaps low-tech Italian SMEs into being more remote-friendly, and slowly indirectly improve the flexibility and work-life balance of employees. And of course, most hands-on jobs can&#x27;t be done remotely, but most office jobs can.

The article is a bit out of date, it&#x27;s not only Seattle. Facebook and Google announced tonight that all employees in the Bay Area can work from home. Microsoft&#x2F;Linkedin announced all employees on the west coast can work from home.

&gt; <i>&quot;at least 70 confirmed cases and 10 deaths.&quot;</i><p>This low number of confirmed cases combined with the high number of deaths, suggests there are hundreds of undiscovered cases still out there. Most countries seem to have a death rate closer to 2%, but in the US it appears to be a lot higher, which suggests many cases are not represented in these numbers. That, or it&#x27;s become a lot more deadly. Neither is good.

Microsoft is going further for employees who literally can&#x27;t work from home.<p>Title: Microsoft will pay hourly workers regularly even if they spend less time on the clock because of coronavirus<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;03&#x2F;05&#x2F;microsoft-will-pay-hourly-workers-regularly-as-it-faces-coronavirus.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;03&#x2F;05&#x2F;microsoft-will-pay-hourly-wo...</a><p>&quot;The policy applies to people who work for other companies but provide services like bus rides or food service to Microsoft.&quot;

I&#x27;ve worked remote very often and ive always felt that the current open plan offices are way too much of a distraction to get work done. This is the right change and remote working needs this change to happen despite the whining by the usual suspects of people sitting in office until late for no other reason than pleasing their bosses.<p>Hopefully, the focus will no move to tangible results being delivered than what dress you wear and how much time you spend at office.

This is a massive accidental experiment on the effectiveness of remote work in general.<p>A lot of entities (here in .it, besides companies: public administration workers and education workers) are turning to remote working, either willingly or unwillingly.<p>I really hope we&#x27;ll all do a good retrospective after this emergency is solved and can finally challenge our own assumptions.