Twitter Advises 5,000 Global Employees To Work From Home (bloomberg.com) 31
Twitter is "strongly encouraging" its almost 5,000 global employees to work from home due to concerns over the spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus, the company said Monday. From a report: The social media company made the suggestion as part of a blog update one day after it suspended all non-critical travel for workers, including pulling out of the South by Southwest conference scheduled for later this month in Austin, Texas. Twitter says it's mandatory for employees in Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea to work from home, but that other offices will remain open for those who choose or need to come in. "We are working to make sure internal meetings, all hands, and other important tasks are optimized for remote participation," the company wrote on its blog. Twitter's policy on working from home is a step beyond what most companies in the U.S. are doing as the virus spreads.
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Other numbers (Score:2)
0.1% vs. 2.0%. That's an order of magnitude higher
Total *world-wide* death toll estimated so far for covid-19:
3131 [arcgis.com] (as of writing).
Total *US-only* death toll estimated so far for Influenza:
18'000-46'000 [cdc.gov].
And regarding the 2%: as the already peer-reviewed and published (in reputable journal) cohort studies of the virus in china [jamanetwork.com] puts it:
5K global employees? (Score:2, Insightful)
I struggle to even imagine what these people do. Does twitter need that many people to post deep state hoaxes?
Re: 5K global employees? (Score:1)
Yea, amazing how inept this deep state is. It's almost as if they aren't even trying to overthrow the country and instead are trying to make a few bucks on marketing data and ad space. Weird, I'm sure it is all part of their master plan. We better elecect an autocrat before the deep state takes away our freedoms.
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I struggle to even imagine what these people do.
When a site looks like it was slapped together by a college student over a weekend, we are often surprised to learn that there are thousands of people behind it.
But Twitter makes its money from advertising and licensing data. Most of these 5000 people work in sales and marketing.
some companies get it, some don't (Score:5, Informative)
mine has just asked us to meet in the company cafeteria at 5pm for a VIDEO CONFERENCE, from a remote ceo.
the total lack of clue is astounding. the ceo guy is not HERE, he's on a conference feed; so why can't employees just dial in for that instead of GATHERING EN MASSE in the caf?
I'm definitely not going. that's beyond absurd to even ask us to do that.
good on twitter for taking the lead. hope others will wise up and let people work remotely.
gathering in crowds is really NOT a good idea, guys. any company that asks that of you is risking your health.
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It will be interesting to see the networking VPN reports over the next couple of weeks. Here in Seattle we'll have a ton of people VPN in if it snows or something, but i don't think they've ever had a sustained push for people to work from home before. Depending on how successful this is they may scale back on construction plans and have people work from home more often.
Re:some companies get it, some don't (Score:5)
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"Hey, I have a good idea -- let's get a bunch of people into a single room in the midst of a public health crisis."
The same single room that many of them gather in regularly for lunch?
It's a stupid idea simply because when you're already doing a video conference there's no reason everyone else can't just view it from their own computer. Hell, there's no reason not to just record the CEO's remarks and let everyone watch it on their own time. Or just skip the whole thing together because the CEO doesn't really want to hear from the rank and file and the rank and file aren't going to get anything important from the CEO.
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Presumably not every single person gathers in there at the same time every day, especially if they are sick. I know at my previous job we had a cafeteria and most days I either ate at my desk or walked across the street to the Chinese place, and most of our department did something similar.
Re:some companies get it, some don't (Score:4, Funny)
mine has just asked us to meet in the company cafeteria at 5pm for a VIDEO CONFERENCE, from a remote ceo.
the total lack of clue is astounding.
It may be part of their under-the-table effort to cull the workforce of workers with weaker immune systems. Those people can really rack up the insurance costs.
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Are you in hotbed of infection? not holding regular business meetings in most places seems like an extreme over-reaction.
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Sounds more like mass layoffs and they don't care how sick you are in two weeks. How is the company's health?
Re:some companies get it, some don't (Score:4, Interesting)
1) Many conferencing systems bill by the user. You probably don't realize it, but the cost of hosting 10 users or less is significantly lower (and this is pretty much 99% of all conference calls) than hosting 100+ individual streams. It's why companies often have one corporate conferencing system for regular meetings, and special book another one for investor conferences which for the most part can be done via the corporate conference system, but because of rules, may balloon and thus require booking a larger virtual conference room, a moderator and other things just for the one meeting.
2) You're obviously someone who doesn't participate. So why bother going? I mean it, I can tell you don't go. As someone who's been ignored during conferences, sometimes it's important to get your question heard by others. It's easy to mute an "inconvenient" questioner who's participating at their desk. Much less easy when asked (or shouted) and heard by dozens of others.
And yes, it happens a lot. You see it often on online conferences where the speaker says something clearly wrong, but your question about it is never acknowledged, even if you ask or chat about it (which are moderated by the speaker, so no one else sees your question either).
3) We're not in a place where multicast quite works yet, so each stream takes up a lot of bandwidth. You may be surprised, but phone lines are often overprovisioned (you may have say, 100 extensions for individuals, but only 20 actual phone lines so only 20 people can actually call in or out at any one time). And unless internet is generously provided, well, this could degrade into hilarity because the internet connection gets saturated with everyone viewing at their desk.
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Told ya (Score:5, Insightful)
I said this would (and should) happen.
With rare exception, there's little reason for people who work primarily on a computer to ever set foot in an office.
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I've always worked much better and more efficiently from home than in any office
How did you measure that?
For some tasks I am better off from home: data cleansing after the rules were defined, transporting / loading it, coding when working off REALLY good requirements, executing test scripts.
For others I find it valuable to get even a few minutes face to face with other people on my team or with a customer of my work.
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For others I find it valuable to get even a few minutes face to face with other people on my team or with a customer of my work.
That's what Skype or some similar service is for.
I don't want to get dressed, drive somewhere, wait for a meeting, spend a few minutes getting details clarified, then drive back home when I could have done the same thing over Skype or Teams or whatever in 10 minutes.
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I said this would (and should) happen.
With rare exception, there's little reason for people who work primarily on a computer to ever set foot in an office.
I have worked at home exclusively for 10 years and in offices for 15. There are benefits and downsides of both. I tend to find I perform better in offices...I work harder at home, I work smarter in an office.
Communication is important. I work with about 500 people in my group alone. Our top 20 contributors are in the office more often than not. Our remote ones are usually the most mediocre. We have an office that is difficult to commute to (Boston traffic is terrible) and generous remote work polic
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We have an office that is difficult to commute to (Boston traffic is terrible)
Traffic is terrible everywhere unless you're in an unpopulated flyover state.
Boston, DC, New York, Seattle, Atlanta, LA, San Francisco, Phoenix, Columbus, Colorado Springs, Omaha, Tulsa, Dallas, Portland, Wichita, Sacramento, Chicago, Miami, Tampa...they all have sucky traffic. I'm unaware of any real city where traffic doesn't suck.
Companies should just bite the bullet and embrace telecommuting. No one and I mean NO ONE wants to drive in traffic. Even masochists would rather flog themselves at home than dr
Are there any real reasons why we don't do this... (Score:1)
Meat meetings should be obsolete. (Score:3)
That they are not a a tech failure. Force people to work remotely and the system will adapt.
twitter has 5000 employees? (Score:2)
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Do Twitter employees have a social life? (Score:2)
Good Idea against Coronavirus (Score:1)