All the big tech companies sent their workers home weeks before the Bay Area ordered shelter in place, and the bay area was the first place in the US to order it. As a software engineer, I haven’t been to my office since March 12th when I dropped by to pick up some equipment. My company has been less forthright with giving hard dates of when we’ll go back, but they’ve made it clear it isn’t anytime soon and even that they keep pushing back.
If google, Facebook, Apple aren’t asking their software engineers, who can all do their jobs at home but maybe less effectively, to come into the offices…then it isn’t safe. These companies aren’t uniquely benevolent, they have all sorts of wild ways to extract more value from their employees that include making their employees feel special for working there. (Hell, google and Facebook have campuses set up like college campuses with free food, gyms, clubs, etc that exist primarily to convince young programmers to spend more hours at work. Apple is a little less college campus-y and more…well…how you would expect it to be, but it’s still got the gyms and the food) needless to say, their employees are probably less effective working at home. But the powers that be have surely calculated that any lost productivity from being at home is less significant than the productivity lost from, say, losing a teammate to coronavirus, or being afraid to be in work due to the coronavirus, or even just the damage forcing their employees back against their will would do to their brand.
What I’m saying is that all companies only care about profits and if they don’t see it as profitable to have their employees be in the office when previously throughout all time they have required those very same employees to work in an office…then it isn’t safe to be working in an office
I work for a large ISP/cable company.
In January of this year they started loading VPN software on our PCs.
At the beginning of march they started rolling out voluntary work from home but within like, a week of that it turned mandatory.
It’s one of the things I’ll always take with me about this company is how quickly they reacted and how prepared they were to take care of us and how they continue to take care of us through this. Someone high up was paying attention to the situation as early as January and they started, likely as a precaution, being prepared.
A month ago they extended our work from home until early January.
