Interesting. I’m hoping my agency will be more open to telework in the future. I know it won’t be full time but if I could convince my boss that 2-3 times per week long term I can work remotely it’s a game changer.

Little history after 9/11/2001 the SEC really pushed stock exchanges fir the ability to run the exchange with no one there and have geographically diverse data centers or go to cloud.

Hurricane Sandy hit Oct 2012 and one major exchange has a single employee location in downtown Manhattan operated 100 percent remote with all employees WFH for five weeks. Ran perfectly from a business point of view. That was first true test for zero employees.

In past they did run in DR:BCP employee many times in tests but always a handful came in just in case. In 9/11/2001 a few exchanged claimed 100 percent based on tests they could run 100 percent remote but in end they shut down.

Basically we had capacity to all work from home for 20 years. Just never did it

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I work with one of the FANG companies, and they still want FTE to be located within a couple of hours of the department location. So even if you get to WFH, they want you at least in the same state, or within a couple of hours from that dept. location. So, it's not like they would be fine with you live in SD and working for a department located in NY or MV. Maybe if you are a superstar engineer, but there are only a handful of such people. For the rest of the employees, they don't want them that far away.

I've never heard any of the FANGs use the term "department" for any tech org and even if it were just semantics, there are hundreds of examples in each company of distributed engineering teams (sometimes remote wfh, sometimes distributed between offices in the US).

You have to have a physical office in the even that there is a cyber attack on the VPN access layer, you need a place where you can access resources securely.

Do you spout this nonsense everyday or is today an exception?

You don't know jack shit about cyber attacks, or VPN (did you just make up the phrase "access layer"?) or security.

Offices can be connected via leased direct lines and this represent a WAN structure. All of your users WFH are using public internet with a VPN network layer, and if that public internet facing layer is compromised you want to be able to circle the wagons. It’s one thing to have your websit DDOS another for someone to gain access to your Git repository.

I’m not a cyber security expert, but did study networking, and I work on our companies coop plans and we have backup facilities for a reason. Having a fully virtualized distributed workforce opens up this risk.

I guess you can pay to run everything on AWS and let them carry the risk, but that burns $$$

Lemme give you a hint. That's not how it works.

Even in a company the size of Google, the number of people who need to touch the core infrastructure (whether onsite or offsite) is less than 5. Ask me how I know. These 5 people have private jets (paid by the company) at their beck and call (if needed), in case of an intrusion. The number of people worldwide who actually understand cyberattacks and how to stop them is most likely less than 100. These are the people employed by the state actors, Fortune 10 and the likes. They are very very coveted and literally have a blank check.

From a real estate perspective, this has zero impact. Those few people can live anywhere, can afford to live anywhere, and institutions fall over themselves to pay for their living. (Think Tony Mansions, in some of the most expensive zip codes worldwide).

The rest? They are just fodder.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I work with one of the FANG companies, and they still want FTE to be located within a couple of hours of the department location. So even if you get to WFH, they want you at least in the same state, or within a couple of hours from that dept. location. So, it's not like they would be fine with you live in SD and working for a department located in NY or MV. Maybe if you are a superstar engineer, but there are only a handful of such people. For the rest of the employees, they don't want them that far away.

I've never heard any of the FANGs use the term "department" for any tech org and even if it were just semantics, there are hundreds of examples in each company of distributed engineering teams (sometimes remote wfh, sometimes distributed between offices in the US).

You have to have a physical office in the even that there is a cyber attack on the VPN access layer, you need a place where you can access resources securely.

Do you spout this nonsense everyday or is today an exception?

You don't know jack shit about cyber attacks, or VPN (did you just make up the phrase "access layer"?) or security.

Offices can be connected via leased direct lines and this represent a WAN structure. All of your users WFH are using public internet with a VPN network layer, and if that public internet facing layer is compromised you want to be able to circle the wagons. It’s one thing to have your websit DDOS another for someone to gain access to your Git repository.

I’m not a cyber security expert, but did study networking, and I work on our companies coop plans and we have backup facilities for a reason. Having a fully virtualized distributed workforce opens up this risk.

I guess you can pay to run everything on AWS and let them carry the risk, but that burns $$$

I work in cybersecurity and I have no idea what you are talking about, unless it's a reference to some obscure kind of air gapped LAN that top secret agencies would need in the event of catastrophic failure. In the private sector, I don't know any data that would be useful if you denied access to those not physically on-site, with maybe one or two esoteric exceptions (cryptocurrency cold storage?).

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I work with one of the FANG companies, and they still want FTE to be located within a couple of hours of the department location. So even if you get to WFH, they want you at least in the same state, or within a couple of hours from that dept. location. So, it's not like they would be fine with you live in SD and working for a department located in NY or MV. Maybe if you are a superstar engineer, but there are only a handful of such people. For the rest of the employees, they don't want them that far away.

I've never heard any of the FANGs use the term "department" for any tech org and even if it were just semantics, there are hundreds of examples in each company of distributed engineering teams (sometimes remote wfh, sometimes distributed between offices in the US).

You have to have a physical office in the even that there is a cyber attack on the VPN access layer, you need a place where you can access resources securely.

Do you spout this nonsense everyday or is today an exception?

You don't know jack shit about cyber attacks, or VPN (did you just make up the phrase "access layer"?) or security.

Offices can be connected via leased direct lines and this represent a WAN structure. All of your users WFH are using public internet with a VPN network layer, and if that public internet facing layer is compromised you want to be able to circle the wagons. It’s one thing to have your websit DDOS another for someone to gain access to your Git repository.

I’m not a cyber security expert, but did study networking, and I work on our companies coop plans and we have backup facilities for a reason. Having a fully virtualized distributed workforce opens up this risk.

I guess you can pay to run everything on AWS and let them carry the risk, but that burns $$$

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I work with one of the FANG companies, and they still want FTE to be located within a couple of hours of the department location. So even if you get to WFH, they want you at least in the same state, or within a couple of hours from that dept. location. So, it's not like they would be fine with you live in SD and working for a department located in NY or MV. Maybe if you are a superstar engineer, but there are only a handful of such people. For the rest of the employees, they don't want them that far away.

I've never heard any of the FANGs use the term "department" for any tech org and even if it were just semantics, there are hundreds of examples in each company of distributed engineering teams (sometimes remote wfh, sometimes distributed between offices in the US).

You have to have a physical office in the even that there is a cyber attack on the VPN access layer, you need a place where you can access resources securely.

Do you spout this nonsense everyday or is today an exception?

You don't know jack shit about cyber attacks, or VPN (did you just make up the phrase "access layer"?) or security.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I work with one of the FANG companies, and they still want FTE to be located within a couple of hours of the department location. So even if you get to WFH, they want you at least in the same state, or within a couple of hours from that dept. location. So, it's not like they would be fine with you live in SD and working for a department located in NY or MV. Maybe if you are a superstar engineer, but there are only a handful of such people. For the rest of the employees, they don't want them that far away.

I've never heard any of the FANGs use the term "department" for any tech org and even if it were just semantics, there are hundreds of examples in each company of distributed engineering teams (sometimes remote wfh, sometimes distributed between offices in the US).

You have to have a physical office in the even that there is a cyber attack on the VPN access layer, you need a place where you can access resources securely.

Anonymous wrote:I work with one of the FANG companies, and they still want FTE to be located within a couple of hours of the department location. So even if you get to WFH, they want you at least in the same state, or within a couple of hours from that dept. location. So, it's not like they would be fine with you live in SD and working for a department located in NY or MV. Maybe if you are a superstar engineer, but there are only a handful of such people. For the rest of the employees, they don't want them that far away.

I've never heard any of the FANGs use the term "department" for any tech org and even if it were just semantics, there are hundreds of examples in each company of distributed engineering teams (sometimes remote wfh, sometimes distributed between offices in the US).

I work with one of the FANG companies, and they still want FTE to be located within a couple of hours of the department location. So even if you get to WFH, they want you at least in the same state, or within a couple of hours from that dept. location. So, it's not like they would be fine with you live in SD and working for a department located in NY or MV. Maybe if you are a superstar engineer, but there are only a handful of such people. For the rest of the employees, they don't want them that far away.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why are they in Silicon Valley if they are remotely distributed?

Three words. Sand Hill Rd.

"Companies" being based in Silicon Valley has more to do with finding angel investors and raising capital, than software talent. The capital pool is completely concentrated there.

Yes, this is the answer. Execs and senior product people need to be in the Bay Area if you want to tap into that pool of capital. But the bulk of the company can be elsewhere. I expect to see an explosion of "satellite" offices in tier 2 cities once the pandemic settles down.

That was happening long before. That’s not WFH.

Yeah, it's been a trend, as COL and tech salaries have risen in the Bay Area it's built up the pressure to open satellite offices elsewhere.

A system can be unstable for a long time and then a seemingly-random catalyst comes along and causes the "reset" or leap in evolution to occur, however you want to classify it. It's the last snowflake that falls on the mountain that causes the avalanche. I think that's what the pandemic will be for wfh, at least in tech and tech related businesses.

I worry about the inequality between wfh tech and "new economy" jobs versus "old economy" jobs that may revert to awful commutes, stuffy offices, and face time. Most lawyers seem so miserable as it is, if they knew how cushy these tech jobs really were now, there'd be a revolution and half of the law schools would probably have to close.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Right now productivity is maintained b/c pandemic means we have nothing better to do. People are WFH more hours than they will when they “have a life”.

And again, it’s only been 10 months, how many new products or services have been spun up from whole cloth in that time? I think we are still cruising on the work from the before times.

We've launched a bunch of new products in the last 10 months. Most software devs enjoy writing and deploying software at scale. It's what they do for fun if they aren't working, in many cases. We don't babysit them so if you wanted to come into the office and read the news all day, or find a nook and play video games, you could have done that, but it was never really a problem at this level.

People at my agency have worked through a bunch of emergency use authorizations for drugs; it's been even busier than before. If you mainly work with software and data analysis, you don't have to go into the office to be productive.