Anyone else working from home?

[Sermil]

So, like a lot of tech workers, I'm on work-from-home status for the foreseeable future.

Anyone else out there in same boat? How's it going?

So far, so good. I'm surprised it's going so well, actually, since I need physical test hardware to do my job. But I got it all set up and my work is humming along as well as it ever does.

On the plus side, I can once again wear all my old OOTS shirts which were just too ratty to wear outside!
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[Fyraltari]

No more university for me according to the president tonight. This probably means that I’ll have to do my finals from home.

Getting an internship is going to be even more challenging now.

[Ornithologist]

I can't work from home. :smallannoyed:

On the plus side, there will be much less interactions I have to deal with. I might have to be here, but not many people will. So yay?

[Sermil]

No more university for me according to the president tonight. This probably means that I’ll have to do my finals from home.

Getting an internship is going to be even more challenging now.

Ya, my kid has to take his finals remotely as well. And next quarter is remote for everything except science labs.

[Aotrs Commander]

I mean, I technically work from home normally anyway, so...

[Gwynfrid]

Global WFH policy announced tonight by my company's CEO (40000+ employees). That means only those folks whose work is business critical and can't be done remotely are allowed to come to work.

Fortunately, I'm used to working from home because I'm not at the main site. But you better have the right tools for it (solid VPN, good Internet connection, decent conferencing equipment). If you work from a laptop I strongly recommend using an audio headset.

[Miklus]

They basically shut down the entire country of Denmark for two weeks, so I guess I am.

[factotum]

I've been working from home for several years now, so nothing has really changed as far as I'm concerned--I still hate it.

[farothel]

I am today for reason unrelated to SARS-CoV2. I do see it happen in the forseeable future though and it's not going to be fun. They are currently renovating the apartment next to mine and trying to concentrate while they are removing a kitchen and the floor next door is not going to be a lot of fun. Plus I only have the small laptop screen at home instead of the 2 big screens I have at my workplace. That will also slow things down.

[Douglas]

I work from home all but 3 weeks per year anyway, but my employer has recently been urging everyone to work from home as much as possible. Several company announcements have also mentioned a "zero tolerance" policy on illness - if you're even slightly ill, you stay home, even if your job can't be done from home.

[Khedrac]

My place is having an "everyone who can, work from home" trial on Monday, the twist is that while I have the company laptop so I could work from home, I have no work I can do from home so I am supposed to come in anyway.

[Don't tell them that unless something changes over the weekend, I have no work I can do from my desk either!]

[Rynjin]

Been working form home for the last 2 and a half years or so, so no change for me.

[factotum]

Plus I only have the small laptop screen at home instead of the 2 big screens I have at my workplace. That will also slow things down.

Could you not bring a second monitor home from work and plug it in to the laptop to give you a bit more screen real estate?

[farothel]

Could you not bring a second monitor home from work and plug it in to the laptop to give you a bit more screen real estate?

I can ask, but I don't think they will allow it. They've had some bad experiences in the past.

[darkrose50]

I hope to be soon. I turned in a form yesterday for a work from home pilot. I am in insurance agent. I think that it will be nice to sit in my pajamas, watch Netflix (or play a computer game) until I get a call. Also avoiding ~2.5 hours a day in the car would be nice.

[jdizzlean]

even if the world was on fire, i'd still have to go to work. the upside is no cabin fever :)

[factotum]

I hope to be soon. I turned in a form yesterday for a work from home pilot. I am in insurance agent. I think that it will be nice to sit in my pajamas, watch Netflix (or play a computer game) until I get a call.

It doesn't work that way--your employers will notice if you're not actually working, believe me. Plus it starts to get difficult to differentiate work from leisure if you're doing both in the same place in the same manner.

[Scarlet Knight]

It doesn't work that way--your employers will notice if you're not actually working, believe me. Plus it starts to get difficult to differentiate work from leisure if you're doing both in the same place in the same manner.

Yes! I hate working from home. Home is where I go to forget work. When you can work from anywhere...your boss finds that anyone can do your work from anywhere.

I hope I'll be back on site Monday.

[Brother Oni]

I work in what is technically a support function, but if we stop working, the whole company will grind to a halt (I know from personal experience from the last time I took a holiday, the whole company's training admin falls apart in a little under a fortnight, despite my trying to set up a contingency before I went).

We're coming in Monday to work out logistics of running a split team where half the team works from home while the other half comes in, then we switch for the following week, but that's probably the last time we're all going to be in work at the same time for at least 12 weeks.

[Manga Shoggoth]

I've been working from home for several years now, so nothing has really changed as far as I'm concerned--I still hate it.

Amen! Working from Home is a last resort for me because although it has some advantages I dislike it, and the disadvantages outweigh the advantages.

That said, I have the laptops home this weekend in case of escalation, and I will be transporting them in and out of work next week (stuffing up my exercise routine) likewise.

[ForzaFiori]

Thursday I ended what was basically an internship at a courthouse as they began a "Incredibly liberal telework policy." Basically if you don't have court, please work at home. I'm not sure what they're policy has evolved into now though, since the Governor declared a state of emergency on Friday. School wise, all exams this week are from home, and the first two weeks after spring break are going to be entirely online. I hope that they get it under control soon though, because I definitely prefer in person class to online.

[Velaryon]

Not me, at least not yet. My library has chosen to close to the public for 2 weeks beginning on Tuesday, but we are all still required to come in. We are going to still be fielding reference questions by phone and online, and offering curbside checkout for people who still want to use our materials.

I think we're going to find that ~80%* of the questions we get by phone will be some variation of "are you open today?" which could be easily handled by a voicemail message, but administration is not willing to take the leap just yet.

*The remaining 20% will be people asking us to make an exception for them because they really need to fax/use our computers/get something notarized/other thing that we normally do, and can't we understand that their situation is more important than everyone else's?

Yeah, I'm a little jaded this morning.

[deeselppa]

Found out I may have been exposed 3 weeks ago - out of an "abundance of caution," will stay home another week...

[pumplerum]

Our status is: request to wfh if you like but it may change. If things continue as they have been, I wouldn't be surprised if it goes company wide soon.

[deeselppa]

I expect (here in Ohio) for it to move to “work at home unless legally required to be on site” for a lot of companies this week.

[werehounding]

I'm a student employee, and my university just transitioned to online for the remainder of the semester. I would be working from home, but my supervisor isn't allowing telework - even though my job entirely consists of converting documents and using word. Kind of sucks, but I'm trying to be positive.

[AtlanteanTroll]

My employer never had a work from home policy until the middle of last week, and we are all now on it until mid-April. It's going to be weird.

[Sermil]

My employer never had a work from home policy until the middle of last week, and we are all now on it until mid-April. It's going to be weird.

Good luck to them (and you). The problem with companies that have been anti-WFH until this month is that they don't have the infrastructure set up to enable proper WFH when they need it. They haven't practiced, and now they're going to be trying to go into the hardest possible situation with no room for errors...

[farothel]

Good luck to them (and you). The problem with companies that have been anti-WFH until this month is that they don't have the infrastructure set up to enable proper WFH when they need it. They haven't practiced, and now they're going to be trying to go into the hardest possible situation with no room for errors...

Even the ones that have a policy in place (like where I work) are going to have a lot of trouble. If on a normal day about 20% of your workforce works from home and now it's close to 80%, your VPN has to be quite sturdy (or augmented in the past weeks) to be able to handle that kind of load. I heard today that our IT department was swamped with calls from people who never work from home, now had to and had problems (like not having the right software, having connection problems, etc.). It will take probably a couple of days before that sorts itself out.

[Vizzerdrix]

I'm an unloader/ON stocker. Can't do that from home. I suspect our Lowes may get closed in a week or so. I just have a feeling.

[danzibr]

Nope, still gotta go in, but manning is reduced and shuffled around to minimize exposure.

[Velaryon]

Administration reconsidered and I'm now home for at least 2 weeks. We are still monitoring email from home, but that's it.

[JNAProductions]

Well, I'm not working from home, but I am home.

I worked two jobs, one at a grocery store (which is one day a week) and one at a movie theater (which is now closed). So I'm working one day a week now-and because of that, I can't file for unemployment.

Yay...

[Lemmy]

Pretty much everyone in the company where I work who could be moved to home office was. Myself included. Everyone else had a few extra rules and precautions adopted to try and minimize contagion risk.

I probably will still have to physically be at the office once a week, however.

[Rodin]

Even the ones that have a policy in place (like where I work) are going to have a lot of trouble. If on a normal day about 20% of your workforce works from home and now it's close to 80%, your VPN has to be quite sturdy (or augmented in the past weeks) to be able to handle that kind of load. I heard today that our IT department was swamped with calls from people who never work from home, now had to and had problems (like not having the right software, having connection problems, etc.). It will take probably a couple of days before that sorts itself out.

I used to do IT support, and VPN troubleshooting was one of my special nightmares. You have to try to help a technical luddite solve a problem with about a million possible causes, including "the network is feeling grumpy today" or "you picked the wrong hotel to stay at". And even if the problem is because the Internet infrastructure in the area they were in was last updated in the 1980s, it's still YOUR fault they can't finish their work.

I do not miss that part of the job one bit.

[farothel]

I used to do IT support, and VPN troubleshooting was one of my special nightmares. You have to try to help a technical luddite solve a problem with about a million possible causes, including "the network is feeling grumpy today" or "you picked the wrong hotel to stay at". And even if the problem is because the Internet infrastructure in the area they were in was last updated in the 1980s, it's still YOUR fault they can't finish their work.

I do not miss that part of the job one bit.

I can totally agree. I've never worked IT support, but as programmer I do get in contact with people who don't understand what we deliver them (like one who couldn't see all her rows in an excel I delivered because she had filters on and couldn't see it, but I digress). For me today it wasn't a question of the network and VPN not working, but of it being swamped. It's not really a lot of fun trying to read in 50MB datasets over a connection that goes just above the speed of 90s dial up. You can only drink so much coffee while waiting. :smalltongue:

[Miklus]

So already late Monday it became apparent that this work-from-home was not going to work out. It is not easy coordinating things over e-mail when no one apparently bothers to check it. So I suggest a small meeting this Tuesday morning with my head-of-department just to answer the question: What the hell am I supposed to be doing anyway? I don't want to meet back in two weeks and find out that I was SUPPOSED to be working on something else or that someone else also did that work. Could I have some very basic management, please?

We don't have a lot of meetings where I work and It quickly became apparent why. We are not very good at meetings. In fact, we are epic bad at meetings. All I wanted was to make a simple To-Do list and then distribute the tasks so I have a few things to chew on when working from home.

This other co-worker shows up with the same question, fair enough. He is wearing a face mask and does NOT want to be there. His wife calls him every five minutes. I start on the list of task that I have prepared in advance and hope that we can distribute them among us and maybe add a few more points that I may have missed. Very naive. My boss, the most disorganized person in the world starts meandering all over the place and goes into the minutest detail. The list is not progressing. I can't get a word in, he has this habit of talking nonstop and if anyone else says something he starts talking on top of them. Then random, uninvited people starts joining the meeting and starts talking about their own thing, including non-work related things. Then Big Boss gets a whiff of the meeting and crashes it with a ton of questions. He seizes the opportunity to get a full status update in detail which we where not prepared for. Every time his phone rings he turns away and talks for some random time. He then starts evaluating the software. The fact that it is not finished is lost on him and he is pissed because the menus are not to his liking.

The whole thing takes five (5) hours and no decisions are taken, everybody is more confused than when we start. Not least me. The only thing I am reasonably sure I got tasked with was part of the user interface, but there was at least four different opinions on how it should look. No one but me took any notes, the rest will have forgotten all by tomorrow. I estimate about 20 man-hours was lost.

RAAASGU! This is why I never work from home. When you are at work, you at least look like you are working, you know?

[Chen]

How does working at home even fit in to that? I mean dont you normally get tasks that take more than a few hours to complete?

[pendell]

I am a software engineer and working home is working well for my company; We use https://zoom.us/ for teleconferencing and it allows us to coordinate far more effectively than email does. Since we share a bitbucket with teams in Bangalore and Kharkiv, we already had a number of features to make remote work easier. It wasn't that hard to make the US team remote as well.

I dress business casual and work in my home office. While it is also a leisure environment the two never occur at the same time. I find it keeps a level of professionalism when dealing with my colleagues.

I understand why Amazon suspended shipping nonessential items, but I kinda wish I'd been able to order a cosplay sandpeople costume I could wear to the telecon :smallamused:. That or Darth Vader or Muad'dib. It's amazing how many people in SF wear masks.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[veti]

The virus is not yet confirmed in the wild hereabouts, but we all assume it's only a matter of time. So, pretty much every employer in the city is holding "trial days" when they tell everyone to work from home for a day, to see what happens.

When it's one of the bigger employers, it's amazing to see the difference it makes to traffic. It's almost like a holiday out there.

My current employer's chosen day is next Tuesday.

[Clistenes]

I am working from home now. Everybody predicts a huge drop in efficiency... Some jobs just can't be done online as well as in person...

[darkrose50]

I will be either Thursday or Friday. They are passing out the laptops today. My work email has a number at the end of it, and this confuses folks as it does not follow the normal naming convention. This likely caused a delay in my being issued a laptop.

[tomandtish]

I already teleworked 2 days out of 4 (I work 4 10s), so just moved to full time telework. Not a big impact for me.

[Lemmy]

Well... This morning I was informed that even home office hours were suspended, since a lot of it depends on activities that require the physical presence of employees who were told to stay hold for the next two weeks (at least).

The bigwigs said the company currently has no plans to dock anyone's payment... Which is good. Although I'm not sure if that'll last if the quarantine goes for longer than expected.

[RazorChain]

even if the world was on fire, i'd still have to go to work. the upside is no cabin fever :)

Me too! Like my boss said "When the city is burning down and Ragnarök hits us, we'll still be working"

In fact it's lot more work to do nowdays with people from my job put in quarantine

[Eldan]

I was just given an official stamped form that permits me to go out in case of total quarantine curfew. That... kind of hit hard.

[Tarmor]

Last week started with my boss (one of two managing directors) not coming in to work because he wasn't well and was worried he had the Coronavirus. This started a few of us asking what plans the company has for the near future in regards our health and potential closure of our biggest customer.
We're in Australia, small company, nearly all the office staff can do their job from home. By the end of the week they came back with a plan - a roster. Starting next week we alternate between working at home and on-site. Half of us will work from home Monday & Wednesday, the other half are home Tuesday & Thursday. On Friday its mixed, some of the home M/W come to work and some of the home T/Th come in - so what's the point of alternating days in the first place! I'm meant to work two days home, which will be interesting because most of my job requires co-ordination with the people in the warehouse picking and packing orders, or using hardware that has to stay at work. All of the staff find this rather amusing (in that we laugh or we cry - the managers aren't known for good business decisions) and we think this will all fall apart pretty quickly. There's been no meeting to discuss the change, and no guidelines or procedures for how its all going to work, or how we communicate, etc. We should have the office staff who can work from home staying home all week! I expect at this stage to spend my home days with 3-4 hours invoicing in the morning (and emailing those to someone in the warehouse) and then painting figures or writing RPG stuff all afternoon!

[Sermil]

We're in Australia, small company, nearly all the office staff can do their job from home. By the end of the week they came back with a plan - a roster. Starting next week we alternate between working at home and on-site. Half of us will work from home Monday & Wednesday, the other half are home Tuesday & Thursday. On Friday its mixed, some of the home M/W come to work and some of the home T/Th come in - so what's the point of alternating days in the first place!

Ugh, ya, if they're going to shard, they need to commit -- no physical contact between the two halves at all. And two set of people cleaning in between.

[Tarmor]

Ugh, ya, if they're going to shard, they need to commit -- no physical contact between the two halves at all. And two set of people cleaning in between.

Exactly. My two bosses do stuff like this all the time - come up with an idea and put it into practice without really thinking about what they are doing. My boss has organized our usual cleaners to come in every weekend, rather than fortnightly. This means the rubbish bins get emptied and the floor gets mopped more often, which of course isn't particularly helpful in this situation! I do have plenty of leave, and already have a week off before Easter arranged. Hopefully I could take a bit more, but that means warehouse staff have to cover my job, and they won't get a break.

[LadyEowyn]

I’m theoretically working from home, but it’s more like “working” from home because anyone who’s not in an absolutely crucial role has been instructed to stay offline to avoid crashing the VPN.

We’ve been expanding WFH for the last year, but we don’t have the network capacity to have 100% of the workforce doing it.

[Imbalance]

"Take your PC home," they said. "Connect through VPN," they said. "We'll get through this," they said. "No overtime," they said.
I've spent more hours with the rig at my dining room table this week than I'm allowed to bill because not a single contract was put on hold and only one deadline moved by less than two days and none of my company's infrastructure was built to handle this. Remarkably, it is working, albeit very slowly at times. If they manage to free up licensing for the software I use it could smooth out on my end, but in the meantime it feels like I'm using a machine from 20 years ago.

I could really do without the constant checkins, though. Like, you never look over my shoulder this much at the office, so...back off some?

[veti]

Well, my country is now closed, so I'm working from home. But only until Easter, because my contract runs out then, and something tells me it won't be the perfect time to find a new job quickly.

It's liberating. Two days in, we've got a new routine going. In the morning, before breakfast, I take the kids for a walk around the 'hood - about 20 minutes. Then home, wash hands, breakfast, wash more hands. Then settle the kids to whatever educational activities we can find for them, and get down to work. Check on them every hour, mostly to settle arguments about volume control and force-feed them fruit.

Work-wise, I've actually gotten quite a lot done. Even allowing for the extra time fighting with dodgy connections and infrastructure, I think I'm being about as productive as I normally am - because at home, if I want to take a walk or spend five minutes on my phone or read up on the Napoleonic Wars, I don't have to waste time covering for it by getting coffee, talking to colleagues or going to the toilet. And at the end of the day, I don't have to pick the kids up from school. Awesome.

Today for my lunch break I went to the supermarket, and beheld a line of people religiously standing 2 metres apart, queuing to get in. Inside were not many people (the bouncers are operating a one-out, one-in policy to prevent crowding) but plenty of food, assuming you don't want pasta. And reasonable amounts of toilet paper, so nyah to those idiots.

Tomorrow the lockdown proper begins, and if it weren't for the "impending unemployment" thing I'd be quite happy about it. My business is "essential", but my personal role isn't - and since I can do it from home anyway, that doesn't seem like a big difference right now. Here's hoping it's not too long.

[veti]

One thing I hadn't appreciated about working from home when the whole family is home is, just how incredibly time-consuming it is.

In theory I should be saving almost two hours a day by not having to go out and travel to school and work and shops. But in practice, that time is more than eaten up by the kids' demands for help with their work, snacks, and whatever else they can think of to throw at me. I have less free time than ever before.

Gotta go now, someone needs to get focused on their maths.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by veti
…beheld a line of people religiously standing 2 metres apart, queuing to get in.

Whatever country you’re in, I’m impressed. That…doesn’t happen where I am.


Originally Posted by veti
And reasonable amounts of toilet paper, so nyah to those idiots.

I spent yesterday morning driving between six grocery stores, Wal-Mart and a big-box membership club, and not a single roll to be found. Shortages are real where I am.

.

[farothel]

it's now going onto our fourth week of working from home and I'm still not used to it. There are several issues, although I must say that the VPN slowness issue is mostly solved. We get occasional slow issues, but not as much and not as many as I used to have.

It's more a question of liking to talk to colleagues face to face when you ask a question and that's difficult (even with cameras, it's not really the same), the construction works in the appartment next to mine still ongoing (it's basically one guy working alone, so he can continue and it's about the only big job he still has construction material for), the fact that I'm eating way to many cookies while sitting at my desk and the fact that this set-up is not really all that ergonomic (but there's almost no other way to put things) and my neck starts to hurt.

As to the supermarkets, there are some waiting lines at times here, but I've never had the issue. That's one of the advantages of working from home, I know when the slow hours are at the local supermarket and I try to go then. We also have (almost) no issues of stuff not being available, at least not anymore. Sometimes a particular brand can be out, but that you can have at any time. People have settled in and those who bought a five year supply of toilet paper don't need (or have the place for) any more, so I'll get mine now.

According to supermarkets here, people still buy more, but that's because they can't go to a restaurant anymore, so they have to cook for themselves. It's the same for me, I normally eat warm lunch in the cafetaria at work, as I live alone and it's easier and cheaper to eat there, but that's not possible now. Well, at least all those cookbooks can serve a purpose now.