Other.
No special allowances can be made; I keep things running/ fix what doesn’t at a public utility.
We are “strongly encouraged” to work from home, and I did yesterday (for technical reasons I couldn’t until then)
I’m going into the office today to turn on remote access on my work machine (I do a lot of work on VMs, and I could access those)
Will work from home tomorrow, and likely next week
Brian
We’re on “work from home unless you need to be in the office”. Areas of the office that must be manned are on a red team/blue team approach so that half are out at any given time. My work can mostly be done from home, plus I have a mild medical condition that increases my susceptibility to respiratory ailments, so I’m pretty much self-isolated anyway.
The office VPN is struggling a bit; they’re getting people to access email and Skype via their phones instead to reduce the strain.
Tbh I don’t mind working from home occasionally but I work with a good team and miss the banter as well as the “informal information flows” that making work easier.
Our office has ceased f2f contact with clients, courts are closed, workers are urged to work from home; however, there are some mandatory in office tasks that require bodies to accomplish, so 4-5 people must be in office daily. We also have a handful of workers that cannot / will not work from home, so they’ve been in daily. The two head managers are in daily, and two supervisors must be in daily, working out to each supervisor being in office once per week.
OTOH, I have a doctors letter requiring me to work from home through April. So I am.
The tech company I work for in NZ is having everyone who can work from home do so from Mon 23rd. I work on site with a client, they’re gearing up to do much the same.
The plan for both is to get those people that can operate remotely to do so and thus reduce density in the buildings for those that need to still come in to work, giving them some protection from social distancing.
I don’t have a job. I’ve been gainfully unemployed for decades now but I finished my last gig just the other day. Since all my future gigs for the year have canceled, I’m now just plain old unemployed.
Which gives me plenty of time to figure out more about Python and programming AIs. [Carl]So I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.[/Carl]
Yesterday I would have said “optional, but I’m doing it anyway”. The company was strongly encouraging people to work from home, but it wasn’t officially mandatory and some people still were in the office, mostly because part of their work required them to physically be in the lab and work with the hardware. Today it effectively became mandatory. Not because of any directive from the company, but because Sacramento County issued a “shelter in place” order. Meaning people who are able to work from home are pretty much legally required to do so as I understand it.
This is going to permenantly rewrite how the American labor force works. A significant portion of Americans who have suddenly discovered they can work from home will never return to the workplace. Employers will discover they dont need to pay for big offices to holds these workers. Peoploe will have a new realization which positions are and are not critical in thier organizations and much will be reorganized permenantly.
Because I was on vacation overseas (in Canada) last week I was mandated to work from home for 2 weeks. It was nothing but problems. It took 8 hours on the first day for me to be able to log in and 3 hours on the second day. I kept having to drive back to the office to pick up equipment (actually driving back and forth more than if I just stayed in-house). Today was the breaking point today when I found out I needed a cheap piece piece of equipment that work doesn’t have and told me I need to buy myself without getting reimbursed. I refused so they finally let me come in-house and work in another empty part of the building. They’re in the process of trying to get everyone to work from home.
When this all seemed to be getting serious, my boss called me into his office to say that I should do whatever makes me comfortable, and I’d be paid full salary no matter what. I’ve been working at the office every day since then (huge office, only four of us there), because it’s a lot easier to do my job from there, and I love getting out of the house. Just tonight it was announced by our governor that all non-life-sustaining jobs were work-from-home only, so I guess I’ll give that a shot starting tomorrow. Bleh.
The company I work for makes/sells collaborative and networking hardware/software. We’ve been mandatory work from home since last Wednesday, at least, with progressive levels of that in the week leading up to it.
So, yeah, business is booming for us. I’m being trained in two other technologies so I can support them because their teams are being overwhelmed. One of the few companies in that enviable position.
Well, while my job can be done from home, and they pretty much allowed us to work from home whenever as long as we came in when it wasn’t necessary to work remotely. To be honest, I prefer not to. There’s a lot to be said for being able to hear over the cube wall, and hear what is going on and/or what you can help with.
I am not sure whether folks will continue to do a lot of working from home after the crisis or not. I had a talk with my boss shortly after our WFH policy was announced. He feels that if productivity doesn’t suffer, it may be the beginning of a transition to a permanent one. I personally hope it doesn’t, because I feel I’m less productive at home, and I like being in the office. We’ll see.
In February, I had to leave my terrific new job at the beach because I was not able to sell my place. I couldn’t continue to pay the rent for the new place and the space rent for my mobile, so I had just started to send out my resume when the apocalypse started.
I can go back on retirement. Between that and savings, I can manage to not be homeless, for awhile at least.
I really feel for the people that are worse off.
Eh, I’m not so sure. At least in my industry, teleworking became a “thing” a few years ago and a lot of people/companies switched to it – but the pendulum recently swung back, as both employers and employees started realizing the value of in-person interactions. I’m not aware of a lot of reorgs resulting from all of the teleworking. A benefit, though, is that a lot more people are equipped to work from home now than they were, say, 5 years ago. I also think you might be overestimating the number of people who will be happy to stay *permanently *isolated from their co-workers. But time will tell…
At my job, work from home became mandatory on Monday for everyone except the people in our Fulfillment department, who pack and ship product orders.
Last night, the governor of our state ordered all businesses except for life-supporting ones to close their physical offices. I (and our company C-suite) expect our company to be one of the exceptions because we provide devices to the medical community that locates equipment, staff, and patients, and also provides information on whether the equipment is clean or dirty, which is critical knowledge to hospitals at all times and even more so now.
I do not envy those who work in Fulfillment right now. I know that they’ve put protocols in place for sanitation routines and distancing and the like, but they must all be very uneasy about all of this. I hope they get a big bonus at the end.
NM: Double post, which is just weird.
I expect so, and not just in the U.S. Many companies are old-fashioned and keep doing things the way they’ve always done.
My boss requires us to do a Teams meeting every day, with video, because he wants to see our faces. We actually have a fairly close team, in that we also go for beers together. However, having different work schedules makes it difficult to build up the comraderie and to schedule team events for after work.
I hope so. On the other side I wonder about corporate canteens. They operate by assuming a certain amount of business. If so many people start working from home more often, after this situation, the canteens may have to adjust their business model.
Our canteen closed on Monday, and the next day the company made working from home mandatory. The campus is open, in case someone has to be there. However, they have to have permission from their division head.
Three things, really: (1) I’ve got a really good workspace at work, (2) I’ve got a really crappy workspace at home, and (3) I really like having a strong work/home separation.
Teleworking full-time puts me on the wrong end of (1) and (2), and destroys (3). Our house isn’t big enough that I can have a room that I only use for work, and to make my crappy workspace per (2) into something decent would require finding someone I could hire to design and build a more workable workspace in the corner that’s available to me. (I was contemplating doing that, but I expect the current situation’s going to make that more challenging.)
I’m less than four years from retirement, so moving or adding on to the house for this purpose would be right out.
It became strongly encouraged in my company this week. I was allowed to stay in office only because everyone else in my office stayed home. I stayed working in office because I have a slow Internet connection and do not have a home office set up. I started working from home anyway yesterday because California locking itself down worries me that I might be caught in a sudden lockdown here in Florida without my work laptop.
I’d slightly prefer working from home if I had time to get a better Internet connection and set up a more ergonomic home office. I say slightly because I get very distracted by office noises, but virtual meetings are very slow and frustrating. I feel most productive in a physical office with individual rooms and lots of conference rooms to do face to face meetings. But I’d feel more productive at home than in a cube farm. The benefits of being able to prairie dog a question to someone the next cube over are minimal compared to the huge downsides and you can just IM them anyway.
For the most part there’s no reason I can’t normally work from home; there’s only a few things I’m responsible for that require I use a secure machine on-site (DoD are real sticklers for that kind of thing ;)).
The main reason is just my bosses don’t like it. The previous director of the department allowed a few people to telework but soured on it because she had a habit of randomly calling during the day just to check in, and often she would find them not available or obviously doing something that was not work. She basically taught the subsequent and current director everything she knows about the job, so the current director doesn’t care for it either. Otherwise my main responsibilities could be accomplished from literally anywhere I can access the internet.
However, if this works out okay it might soften her on it. The two women who got pregnant were allowed to telework have managed to convince her to let them work from home permanently. Guess I just have to figure out a way to get pregnant. 
(I’m a 42 year old man)
Same here. We make food products, some for restaurants and some for retail. We were declared vital to the effort so we won’t be shut down when the governor shuts down travel. We got our “papers” so we can travel through blockades yesterday.