Another virus thread

[MyGodWearsAHoodie]

I hope the mask wearing becomes a norm for people with colds, like it is in asian countries.

I hoping staying home when sick becomes the norm.  First universal sick leave and also a cultural shift away from “suck it up and come in sick” to it is selfish to expose others to your germs.

[Fau Teixeira]

I hoping staying home when sick becomes the norm.  First universal sick leave and also a cultural shift away from “suck it up and come in sick” to it is selfish to expose others to your germs.

It's the norm in every tech job I've had for the past 15  years. if you're sick .. work from home .. no questions asked.

[Pappy13]

I hoping staying home when sick becomes the norm.  First universal sick leave and also a cultural shift away from “suck it up and come in sick” to it is selfish to expose others to your germs.

I'm hoping that working from home becomes the norm. I thought I would like working from home, I was wrong, I LOVE it. Look at all these benefits from working from home.

1) Less chance of getting sick, spreading your sickness.
2) 2 hours of commute time turns into 2 more hours a day to do whatever I want.
3) Less wear and tear on my vehicle
4) About $100 a month savings on fuel.
5) *More flexible work hours.
6) More flexible work wear.
7) More flexible eating options.

Let me give some additional details for #5 & #6. I'm still getting up at the same time every day that I did when I was heading into the office everyday, but since I don't have a commute now I have an extra hour in the mornings to myself. I can spend some time with my wife, catch up on the news, stay up later and sleep in, etc. On top of that I don't necessarily have to shower in the mornings, I can shower whenever it's convenient. Sometimes I wait till noon and take a shower then and I'm fresher when I get off work. Sometimes I'll wait till after work to shower if we plan to go out or something along those lines and don't have to take 2 showers. Since I don't have to go into the office I can wear whatever I want. I've always been able to wear pretty much what I wanted, but I always tried to dress at least business casual meaning jeans, a collared shirt and tennis shoes. Now I can wear shorts and t-shirt if I feel like it. I can take my shoes off and slip on some sandals or house shoes for example. On top of that I can now take breaks throughout the day whenever it's convenient. The trash man comes on Mondays and Thursdays and I always hated having to put out the trash before I left in the morning, now I don't. The trash man doesn't usually pick up till 3:00 so I have the whole day to get the trash out to the curb. If my wife needs me to run to the store, I can do it during my lunch hour. If I need to make a personal phone call I just do, I don't have to find a place at work for some privacy. If I need to look something up on the internet, I can do it no more blocked websites from work. ETC ETC ETC.

And the best part is that my work is not suffering at all with all these benefits in fact in my opinion I get more done now then I ever have before. Sometimes I start work early because I'm already up anyway and maybe just want to get a head start. Sometimes I'll work a little later since I don't have to worry about getting home late. Sometimes I work in the evenings or on the weekends on something that I need to get done the next day or next week etc. I'm happier working from home so my attitude is more positive more often. The more I work from home the more benefits I find to working from home. I know that not everyone's job is like mine, but working from home for me has been the greatest thing that has happened to my work experience. I was made to work this way and I dread having to go back into the office and I hope and pray that they'll allow us to work from home permenantly. I might be dreaming, but I have time for that now.

[dolphins4life]

I'm hoping that working from home becomes the norm. I thought I would like working from home, I was wrong, I LOVE it. Look at all these benefits from working from home.

1) Less chance of getting sick, spreading your sickness.
2) 2 hours of commute time turns into 2 more hours a day to do whatever I want.
3) Less wear and tear on my vehicle
4) About $100 a month savings on fuel.
5) *More flexible work hours.
6) More flexible work wear.
7) More flexible eating options.

Let me give some additional details for #5 & #6. I'm still getting up at the same time every day that I did when I was heading into the office everyday, but since I don't have a commute now I have an extra hour in the mornings to myself. I can spend some time with my wife, catch up on the news, stay up later and sleep in, etc. On top of that I don't necessarily have to shower in the mornings, I can shower whenever it's convenient. Sometimes I wait till noon and take a shower then and I'm fresher when I get off work. Sometimes I'll wait till after work to shower if we plan to go out or something along those lines and don't have to take 2 showers. Since I don't have to go into the office I can wear whatever I want. I've always been able to wear pretty much what I wanted, but I always tried to dress at least business casual meaning jeans, a collared shirt and tennis shoes. Now I can wear shorts and t-shirt if I feel like it. I can take my shoes off and slip on some sandals or house shoes for example. On top of that I can now take breaks throughout the day whenever it's convenient. The trash man comes on Mondays and Thursdays and I always hated having to put out the trash before I left in the morning, now I don't. The trash man doesn't usually pick up till 3:00 so I have the whole day to get the trash out to the curb. If my wife needs me to run to the store, I can do it during my lunch hour. If I need to make a personal phone call I just do, I don't have to find a place at work for some privacy. If I need to look something up on the internet, I can do it no more blocked websites from work. ETC ETC ETC.

And the best part is that my work is not suffering at all with all these benefits in fact in my opinion I get more done now then I ever have before. Sometimes I start work early because I'm already up anyway and maybe just want to get a head start. Sometimes I'll work a little later since I don't have to worry about getting home late. Sometimes I work in the evenings or on the weekends on something that I need to get done the next day or next week etc. I'm happier working from home so my attitude is more positive more often. The more I work from home the more benefits I find to working from home. I know that not everyone's job is like mine, but working from home for me has been the greatest thing that has happened to my work experience. I was made to work this way and I dread having to go back into the office and I hope and pray that they'll allow us to work from home permenantly. I might be dreaming, but I have time for that now.

Not to mention the benefits on the environment

Sadly, I am on the front lines in both my jobs, so I cannot work from home.

[Spider-Dan]

I'm hoping that working from home becomes the norm. I thought I would like working from home, I was wrong, I LOVE it.

As a long-time IT worker, let me just pass along a frequent saying in my industry:

"If you can do your job from home, someone else can do it from India at 1/5th of the price."

There's not zero-risk here.

[dolphins4life]

As a long-time IT worker, let me just pass along a frequent saying in my industry:

"If you can do your job from home, someone else can do it from India at 1/5th of the price."

There's not zero-risk here.

So why hasn't Pappy's company done that already?

[MyGodWearsAHoodie]

So why hasn't Pappy's company done that already?

Up until recently the company thought they needed Pappy in the office.  And in the middle of a pandemic which is also affecting India is not the time to set up an overseas center. 

However, once the pandemic is over many companies that now realize the don’t need people to be in the office are going to also realize the don’t need an American workforce.  Don’t be shocked if over the next 5 years many of those jobs are outsourced overseas.

[Pappy13]

So why hasn't Pappy's company done that already?

They have. I'm still here. We have a support team in India that works the night shift since that's during the day for them. Technically I'm a contractor that works for a company based in Mexico and most of the support team works from Mexico although I'm not sure how much cheaper they are. Definitely not 1/5 of my salary. Maybe 4/5s? But that's mostly because I'm still the lead support team member. Are they as good as me? Well I trained ALL of them so they are pretty good, but I'm still the one they look to when things go wrong or somone has questions. I've been there 12 years, most of these people have been here 3 or less. I've been through 3 different consulting firm changes and I'm still here. I'm not going anywhere. Again, my situation is different from most, but it can be done.

I would say about 75% of the technology folks working for Southwest now are employees and they are all working for home. Southwest is finding out that it can work and it does work. How much money is Southwest saving by all those people working from home? There's a BIG building with the lights turned off and the a/c turned down. They have stopped the cafeteria service that was expensive. They have reduced the cleaning crew down to practically nothing. How much would they save if they sold that building and didn't have ANY of the costs associated with it? Would that make up the 1/5 savings they *might* be able to make going with all consultants from Mexico or India? Pretty sure they would. The thing is they are already saving money with their employees working from home. Why bring us back into the office? In fact Southwest has already stated that we won't come back to the office until at least June of next year and even then it won't be 100% in the office like it was. Maybe they will bring back 33% into the office at first and then slowly ramp it back up again or maybe they will decide they don't need to be in the office and will have people working from home 2 or 3 days a week. Who knows. I think other technology companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft etc are seriously considering keeping their staff working from home. It's working. Why bring them back unless theres a very compelling reason to do it? Right now I don't see one. Companies have adapted. It wasn't painless, there was a lot of work done to get everyone the necessary tools needed to be able to collaborate from home. They've had to beef up the network. They've had to increase the cybersecurity. But that's all been done now. There's no road blocks anymore, there's only the decision whether it's better to work from home or work from the office. I think there's a very good chance many companies will stay this way.

[Fau Teixeira]

It also depends on the specific industry. I work with computerized controls at a factory that actually manufactures stuff. So outsourcing is not going to happen. But even before this job, at companies that tried outsourcing development, the results were very mixed. At the very least, if you're going to outsource development, you'd need to massively ramp up a business staff (PMs, BAs) to properly manage that effort.

Also don't disregard that cultural differences do exist.

Years ago (about 15) i worked at a website company and we were building a website for a company that did military moves. Their niche was packing up service members homes and moving them from base to base.  Anyways, we outsourced the initial design and what we got back were 2 website designs. one was pretty normal .. the other one had a UFO flying in the header next to a tank and a helicopter.  Our project manger had told them to include some military hardware in that version and the outsourcing team figured a full on flying saucer was part of the american military arsenal.

[Pappy13]

Up until recently the company thought they needed Pappy in the office.  And in the middle of a pandemic which is also affecting India is not the time to set up an overseas center.  

However, once the pandemic is over many companies that now realize the don’t need people to be in the office are going to also realize the don’t need an American workforce.  Don’t be shocked if over the next 5 years many of those jobs are outsourced overseas.

As Fau mentioned above it's not quite as easy as that. Southwest tried a company from India and it didn't go well for a variety of reasons. There were the obvious ones like language barrier. Yes Indian's speak English, they are taught it in school, however most have a severe accent so much so that it's tough to understand them especially when on a phone call to India. It got to be such a problem with me that I preferred chatting with them or e-mail where their written English was much easier to understand. Cultural differences also come into play and just the whole notion of outsourcing. People from India are frowned upon if they work the same job for more then 2 years. The thought is "Why are you not getting promoted or moved onto a better job"? So there is HUGE turnover in jobs in India. MUCH more then in the US. Every time a new person comes in there is training costs and ramp up time to be factored in before they become effective. On top of that there is also the time difference problem. Night in the US is Day in India and vice versa. At first glance that seems like a bonus, you can have them work the night shift, but the problem is that you have to have a very clean hand off then from the night shift to the day shift and there can be issues with that. Plus although that does cover the night shift say Midnight to 8:00 AM it doesn't help with the 5:00 Pm to Midnight Shift. In fact that's one of the reasons that Southwest has both an Indian crew and another crew from Mexico who work the 5:00 PM to Midnight shift so now you have 2 launguage barriers and 2 culture shifts to contend with. I don't care if you are saving money if it's impacting the service you provide. Outsourcing is NOT the ultimate solution, it's a solution but it's far from perfect. If you can save some money by having US employee's working from home that's not a bad alternative.

[fyo]

Up until recently the company thought they needed Pappy in the office.  And in the middle of a pandemic which is also affecting India is not the time to set up an overseas center. 

However, once the pandemic is over many companies that now realize the don’t need people to be in the office are going to also realize the don’t need an American workforce.  Don’t be shocked if over the next 5 years many of those jobs are outsourced overseas.

I used to work for a company that at the time was one of, if not the, largest US-based employer. They decided to outsource their internal financial software development to India. For all the time I was there, we had more Indians around *locally* than there had been software developers working on that project before. I don't know the end result, but the process was an absolute disaster. No way was it even remotely cheaper than having our guys just do it from the onset.

That said, there are of course a lot of things you could outsource in development, but particularly for internal software (which tends to be more flexible and changing than software packages that are sold to others), it's just not a good solution.

I've also had nothing but bad experiences with companies that attempt to outsource their internal IT support, although it seems incredibly popular (not always to India, could just be to a different local company).

[Fau Teixeira]

outsourcing can work .. if properly structured .. but not if you think you're just gonna replace 3 local developers with 3 indian developers and just profit. Then it's bound to fail .. spectacularly.

to replace 3 local developers you'd need to hire a project manager, a business analyst and probably a remote development manager plus the three remote developers just to try to match the original pace of development

[fyo]

^ In our case we had a lot of local developers and some managers working on it before being outsourced. After, we added a few managers and had *more* Indian developers from the company we'd outsourced to constantly around trying to get things working properly. Then there was an unknown number of developers actually working in India on it. But then we also had to have the Indian devs travel to a bunch of our other offices, including in other countries, in order to get things squared there. This used to be done with emails and a conference call every few months.

For outsourcing to work well in my experience, it has to be a "black box" type package with very well-defined specifications - preferably ones that don't change over time.

[Spider-Dan]

Hey, I'm not saying outsourcing is financially sound long-term.  But CEOs are paid bonuses in the short-term.  So if they have the opportunity to cut costs and get a big bonus from increased profit, even if the company realizes 5 years later that it wasn't a good move, you already got laid off (and lost all your seniority and progress towards a company retirement, if there is one) 5 years ago.

Under our corporate system, outsourcing is an easy way to manufacture short-term profits for big executive bonuses, and is therefore always a threat.

[Pappy13]

Hey, I'm not saying outsourcing is financially sound long-term.  But CEOs are paid bonuses in the short-term.  So if they have the opportunity to cut costs and get a big bonus from increased profit, even if the company realizes 5 years later that it wasn't a good move, you already got laid off (and lost all your seniority and progress towards a company retirement, if there is one) 5 years ago.

Under our corporate system, outsourcing is an easy way to manufacture short-term profits for big executive bonuses, and is therefore always a threat.

Agree with all of that, but don't really see how working from home changes any of that. The biggest hurdle to get over for US companies was fear of the unknown. Well now there is no unknown, they've been doing it now for months. You know everything you needed to know. So the only decision now is was it better before or better how it is now?